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Are special schools being left out of the mainstream inclusion push?

National efforts to make schools more inclusive risk ignoring the huge amount of expertise in the specialist sector, say headteachers
13th December 2024, 5:00am

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Are special schools being left out of the mainstream inclusion push?

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Inclusion push needs more special school input, leaders warn
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Since being elected, the Labour government has said it expects more pupils with SEND to be educated in mainstream schools.

There has also been an increased focus on the importance of inclusion, which is to be part of Ofsted’s new inspection framework, launching next year.

And last week, the DfE announced that £740 million would be earmarked for creating more specialist places in mainstream schools.

So what role will special schools play in this policy push, both in formulating the plan and in its implementation?

Inclusion and special schools

Concern has been raised that special school input will be overlooked in efforts to boost inclusion, because the sector is seen as “lesser” than mainstream.

Special school headteachers want the government to fund a programme to ensure that mainstream schools can access training support for each of the main areas of special educational needs and disabilities.

And headteachers’ leaders have said that the Department for Education should ensure its new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams are focused on bringing together special and mainstream schools.

Special school outreach

The perception of special schools as hubs of excellence is going to be a critical part of any inclusion push, according to Dr Nic Crossley, CEO of the Liberty Academy Trust.

“I think it needs to be actively encouraged and recognised that those in the specialist sector are seen as the experts. I think what many in the sector feel is that special is seen as lesser,” she said.

She added that this is evidenced in how a special school placement is regarded within teacher training, and by the lack of SEND leadership voices informing government policy.

“Due to the complexity of needs and the range of specialist settings, it is often felt that special schools do not offer a robust curriculum - and that narrative, I think, has been quite damaging in developing partnerships.”

The argument is echoed by others who feel collaboration is currently far less than where it should be.

Margaret Mulholland, SEND and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said mainstream schools could “greatly benefit” from collaboration with the specialist sector.

This was “not only through accessing expertise” to help support children with SEND but also “inclusive teaching more generally” and how best to help pupils who face barriers to learning.

Andy Smith, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, added: “Teachers and leaders working in special schools have a wealth of experience that should be captured and shared more widely with mainstream settings as part of our drive towards greater inclusion.”

He told Tes: “This could also be something the Department for Education’s new RISE teams have a lens on.”

Mulholland shared that view, stating that it would be helpful for RISE teams - groups of civil servants and advisers who are due to start supporting schools from next year - to “connect schools with complementary strengths and weaknesses to encourage genuine school-led support and development”, including mainstream and special schools.

SEND support in schools

Collaboration between special and mainstream schools does already happen, but it tends to be informal and relies on local schools facilitating partnerships themselves.

Ms Crossley said more needs to be done to ensure this happens more widely: “It would be really helpful if the government could introduce an approach to encourage and support this. I don’t think a lot of money is needed, but certainly providing cover costs as a minimum.”

She said this could work as a beacon programme, with specialist support offered across the four broad areas of need defined in the SEND Code of Practice.

Ms Crossley added that it could also provide some generalist principles for SEND in the classroom.

“We know that numbers of autism and SEMH (social and emotional mental health needs) are on the rise, so who are the beacon partners that can support this in the local area? Mainstream schools and trusts need to know where the specialists are and what they can offer.”

Are mainstream schools willing to flex?

Matt McArthur, deputy headteacher of Frank Wise, a special school in Oxfordshire that does outreach and training in mainstream schools, says a crucial factor in terms of how much difference the specialist sector can make is how much a mainstream school is willing to “flex” its approach to support children with increasingly complex needs.

“I know there are some schools that are great about thinking about what reasonable adjustments look like, but are also going beyond this. But there are others which seem more rigid about their systems and processes,” he said.

Mr McArthur said special schools can provide input to help teachers adopt strategies in the classroom, but the scope of what is needed depends on the needs of pupils.

He said: “For example, if a school had a lot of children with a high degree of dyscalculia, a special school would be able to come in and deliver training on strategies to use in teaching.”

But for pupils with a greater degree of need, or with complex overlapping needs, he told Tes the input needs to go beyond what happens in the classroom.

“We need to ask, for children who process and perceive the world differently, or who might communicate differently, what does your behaviour policy look like? What does your uniform policy look like? What does moving around the school site and the school’s social areas look like? And to what extent is the school willing to flex its approaches, systems and curriculum to meet these pupils’ needs?”

Resourced provision funding concerns

One approach to answering these questions has been the use of SEND resource bases, where targeted support can be offered within the mainstream school.

A Tes investigation into the use of additional provision to meet SEND pupils’ needs in mainstream schools revealed concerns that a lack of oversight and guidance means these approaches could become “the new wild west” of the education system.

The government has announced that £740 million of capital funding is to be spent creating more specialist places in mainstream schools, although the DfE has said this money could also be used to increase places in special schools.

Allocations for the capital fund will be confirmed in the spring, when guidance will be published outlining how councils can use the investment to improve local provision.

As well as the above concerns about guidance, there are also fears that some schools cannot afford to establish SEN units, and so will not benefit from this rollout, making better links with the specialist sector even more crucial, some believe.

Mr McArthur said: “I have spoken to one-form village entry primary schools with a number of pupils who need this type of provision but they cannot make the funding stack up and can’t afford a teacher.

“You then have teaching assistants doing their best in this provision, perhaps supported remotely by the Sendco writing schemes of work.”

Twinning mainstream and special schools

There are emerging models the government can look to where properly integrated support on SEND is being integrated across schools.

For example, multi-academy trust leaders say their organisations can be well placed to bring together mainstream and special school teaching within the same trust.

Lift Schools, formerly Academies Enterprise Trust, has 57 schools, of which five are special academies. Each special school is part of a regional network with mainstream settings, but the MAT is looking to go further.

Andrea George-Samuels, the trust’s executive principal for SEND, said: “As part of our broader SEND strategy, we are looking into ‘twinning’ our secondary schools with a special school within the trust, where geographically sensible, to enable the mutual sharing of strong practice.”

She said that sharing information across networks can support inclusion.

Ms George-Samuels pointed to an example in the trust’s London and South region, where primary and secondary networks both include SEMH specialist schools. This, she said, is enabling the MAT to work closely to ensure the enrichment curriculum is inclusive.

Tom Rees, CEO of Ormiston Academies Trust, which runs more than 40 schools nationally, said his MAT saw a lot of benefit from having a mix of mainstream, special and alternative settings. “There’s lots of learning that goes both ways, and staff really value the opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other,” he said.

“We see the benefits that specialist knowledge and practice can bring to mainstream practice, as well as special and alternative provision settings benefitting from work taking place across our schools on areas such as curriculum and teacher development.”

He told Tes this was one of the reasons the trust has taken on Queensmill schools, two specialist autism schools in London, this month.

This view is echoed by James Humphries, director of standards and effectiveness at the University of Chichester Academy Trust, which runs 16 schools in the South of England, including primary, secondary, alternative provision, and schools with inclusion units and resourced provision.

He said: “We use this expertise across our academies to provide training for staff, curriculum design and adaptation. We also use it for responding to individual pupils’ needs where mainstream schools have not come across specific needs or behaviours before, which is increasingly the case.”

What can mainstream teachers learn from special schools?

What this support should not be is directly lifting special school approaches into mainstream, according to Amelie Thompson, assistant director of education for SEND at Greenshaw Learning Trust. She has written in a British Educational Research Association publication on the importance of mainstream teachers learning from expertise in the special school sector.

The journal article says mainstream schools can learn from “inquiry-based approaches for curriculum design” from the specialist sector. This will help them to better understand how to ensure plans are “ambitious and build opportunities for all our pupils to engage meaningfully in the lived experience of the curriculum”.

However, she said that this approach needs to be “contextualised to mainstream settings” and that there was a risk of lifting solutions that might not work in mainstream settings.

‘One system rather than two’

That said, Mr Rees, who has just been appointed to lead an advisory group on inclusion for the DfE, tells Tes that it is important not to consider special schools as “being somewhere where pedagogy is fundamentally different to pedagogy that takes place in mainstream schools”.

He added: “Greater complexity of need requires greater expertise, and where learning is more challenging, it’s often more precise, more expert practice that’s required, rather than pedagogy that starts in a different place.”

And Susan Douglas, CEO of Eden Academy Trust, which runs nine special schools, said such schools should no longer be seen as being something separate from mainstream.

“I think as we move forward into a period where we are looking to create more inclusive mainstream schooling, it’s really important that we see the system as one system rather than two.

“I think we’ve traditionally seen special schools as something separate - we need to change that - and see the school system as one continuum, with special schools being one type of setting within that. If we can create that culture, there is an abundance of knowledge and experience that can flow between different settings.”

The DfE has been approached for a comment.

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