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Dame Christine Lenehan, the Department for Education’s strategic adviser on special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), recently made an important distinction between the types of support that pupils need.

Speaking to Tes at the Schools and Academies Show in May, Lenehan questioned whether education, health and care plans (EHCPs) were the “right vehicle” to take the SEND system forward. Her reasoning was that while a small group of children need specialist support around health and care, the majority with an EHCP don’t. What they need, she said, is “a really good, focused education”.

It’s a view that the government appears to share. And as a result, it believes far more children could be educated in mainstream schools rather than special schools, and that the system has to adapt to enable this to happen.

Yet the idea that mainstream schools should be able to provide for an ever-growing spectrum of needs raises a big question: do we really know what good teaching for inclusion looks like? Furthermore, are schools currently being equipped to deliver it?

What is good inclusive teaching?

According to , just 45 per cent of early career teachers felt that their initial teacher training had prepared them to teach pupils with SEND. And across teachers and leaders as a whole, close to a third reported that they did not feel confident in their ability to adapt teaching to the needs of all pupils, including those with SEND.

However, some argue that seeing SEND teaching as something different from general teaching may well be part of the reason why inclusion so often fails.

Rob Webster is a researcher at the Institute for Lifecourse Development at the University of Greenwich and author of The Inclusion Illusion, an analysis of the UK’s largest observation study of pupils with high-level SEND, published in 2022. For him, one of the biggest challenges in this area is that good inclusive teaching is, in many ways, just good teaching - and that can be surprisingly difficult to communicate in a system that has been conditioned to see pupils with SEND as having completely unique needs.

“There have been a few systematic reviews and large-scale research pieces on SEND pedagogy, and one of the striking things that emerges is that the characteristics of good pedagogy for kids with SEND aren’t all that different from good pedagogy, full stop,” Webster says.

However, he adds, if the perception of pupils with SEND “is that they are very different and they have very different and unique sets of needs, it sets up an expectation that the pedagogy then must be vastly different”, when “at its core, it’s very similar”.

Nic Crossley, CEO of Liberty Academy Trust, a specialist trust for autistic children, agrees that when it comes to effective inclusive practice, the quality of teaching is important above all else.

“Providing children are cognitively able to engage with learning, the pedagogy we see in mainstream schools is appropriate for those with SEND,” she says.

For those children who have severe or profound and multiple learning difficulties (and may fall into the group identified by Lenehan as needing specialist support around health and care), it is, Crossley says, “absolutely right that those children require something bespoke”.

“However, for the other children who are identified with specific or moderate learning difficulties, SEMH [social, emotional and mental health needs], SLCN [speech, language and communication needs] and autism, providing they don’t have a significant cognitive impairment, then high-quality teaching is always the key to success,” she adds.

But if good inclusive teaching is basically just good teaching, why isn’t everyone already doing it?

A from the NEU teaching union points to some serious structural barriers to inclusive practice, with 97 per cent of teachers reporting that workload is a factor. NEU members also pointed to lack of staff, large class sizes, inappropriate curriculum, a lack of resources and a lack of external support services as other major obstacles to inclusion.

Beyond these structural barriers, experts highlight four key issues that could be holding inclusive practice back.

Ingrained ideas about SEND support

For Webster, a common problem is the entrenchment of old ideas about the type of support that pupils with SEND need.

His research shows that for many young people with high-level SEND, inclusion in mainstream settings is currently more an idea than a lived reality. While these children are physically present in mainstream classes, their daily experiences are often markedly different from those of their peers, with varying degrees of “structural exclusion” at play, particularly around being withdrawn for separate interventions or having their in-class experiences mediated by teaching assistants.

While well intentioned, he explains, reliance on TAs can be inadvertently limiting - from prioritising task completion over deeper learning to spoon feeding and making pupils feel rushed or as though they are cheating.

Crucially, he continues, this can also prevent teachers from gaining an accurate picture of a pupil’s learning, hindering understanding and subsequent planning. For those reasons, Webster emphasises that children with SEND should ideally be receiving direct instruction from a qualified teacher.

However, that means spending as little time as possible in “transmission mode”, he adds, allowing children to lead interactions where they can, and getting to know them beyond their diagnoses. Understanding their motivations, interests and aspirations is often far more valuable than focusing on the labels they have been given.

According to Crossley, another big barrier to inclusive practice is schools putting too much stock in labels and diagnoses, which can sometimes send teachers off on the wrong track.

To illustrate this, she gives the example of her trust’s “improving teaching” programme, which offers training in an “autism-friendly pedagogy”. This is not something completely different from “mainstream” pedagogy, she stresses. There is a focus on neuroscience and understanding how we learn; on the impact of perception and attention; and on “cognitive load theory as particularly relevant to children with SEND”.

But, she continues, the programme also looks at common teaching practices that would not usually be considered “go-to” strategies for autism. For example, promoting oracy might not ordinarily be a focus because the label of autism states that “autistic individuals have difficulties with social communication, so why bother [with oracy]?”

Gary Aubin, a former Sendco who is now a SEND content specialist for the Education Endowment Foundation and one of the 12-person panel for the government’s curriculum and assessment review, agrees. He says that placing too much emphasis on diagnoses “can give teachers the impression that, ‘No, you don’t have the skills here’”, when the research evidence “points very clearly” towards the fact that high-quality teaching for SEND is made up of “many things that teachers already know, already can do, already do, in many cases”.

‘Good pedagogy for kids with SEND isn’t all that different from good pedagogy, full stop’

Meanwhile, Susana Castro-Kemp, associate professor in psychology and special needs at University College London, has been giving evidence to the DfE and the SEND select committee, including around the idea that relying on diagnostic categories to provide support and services for children can be reductionist and miss their intersectional needs.

“Children can have several different needs at the same time, which makes it very difficult to establish a specific diagnosis,” she says. “But we can identify everyday life needs, and the research is quite clear that that’s more effective for putting the supports in place, rather than waiting for a diagnosis or relying on a traditional diagnostic category. [Diagnosis] is still very important, but for the purpose of intervention in the classrooms, it isn’t the most effective approach.”

Instead, she points out, the research suggests that it may be better to “take a step back and look at inclusion for all as a universal approach”, and then employ more targeted approaches when a child’s needs are not being met by just delivering a universal design.

“That’s a model that has been implemented successfully in other countries,” she says.

The complexity of a needs-based approach

For a needs-based approach to work, however, there has to be a shift in how we think about SEND in schools. This approach relies on building strong relationships and getting to know children as individuals before translating this understanding into practice. And that can be really challenging.

Castro-Kemp is currently leading a large project funded by the Nuffield Foundation, comparing SEND policy and practice in the four UK nations, Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Finland and Australia.

“Even in Finland, which is considered one of the countries with best practice, practitioners still say that they don’t feel prepared [to teach SEND],” Castro-Kemp explains. “There is no recipe for this. It’s a very complex and very subjective profession, really, because it’s about relationships”.

But, she adds, it is possible to help teachers to develop “a set of skills” that they can apply in different contexts, adjusting their approach to suit different children. And this is what we tend to see in “countries that are showing more positive results”.

So, what might this shift look like in practice? Margaret Mulholland, the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, suggests that changing how staff view assessment and attainment could be a good place to start.

“[Inclusive pedagogy] means moving away from fixed-ability thinking,” she says. “When we talk about children who are low attainers, what are we actually talking about? Are they low attaining in everything? That’s a really inaccurate way of framing it.”

‘There is no recipe for this. It’s a very complex and very subjective profession’

Assessment, she adds, is still important because that is the “mechanism” for getting to know the child, but it has to be assessment in the broadest sense.

“When I say ‘assessment’, I mean all forms of assessment: how you get information from parents, how you listen to the child’s voice, how you ask them what worked. Conversations like: ‘We’ve been using the word “wall”. Did that help? How could it improve? What could we do?’ Those kinds of interfaces are the things that will make a real difference in meeting the child’s needs.”

Having those types of conversations and adapting practice in response to them is something that good teachers will do automatically, Mulholland explains. However, such practices are not always “celebrated” as much as they could be within schools, nor are they “championed” enough through professional development.

“Teachers are brilliant at doing this, but they don’t do it quite as deliberately or intentionally as we need them to,” she says.

Inadequate training

When it comes to developing teachers’ understanding of inclusive pedagogy and improving their adaptive practice, training will inevitably be a big part of the solution.

According to Webster, that starts with placing more emphasis on this area in initial teacher training - something that providers and the government have been criticised for not doing enough of in the past.

“The policymakers and universities and providers who run these courses will often say, ‘Well, we would have to drop something else in order to make way for SEND training.’ And my response is that I’m fine with that. I think that’s a good idea. What do you see as being more important?” Webster says.

“Particularly when trainees are saying this is the thing they’re weakest on and need the most help with. Why would you not then respond to that?”

Beyond initial teacher training, Castro-Kemp stresses that there needs to be better ongoing professional development in this area, too. However, this must go further than the standard sessions offering classroom strategies for working with children with dyslexia or ADHD, for example.

She explains that her team is currently working on a “model of supervision” that can be used in schools. The idea is that this will represent a more holistic approach to professional development, which can focus on teachers’ capabilities to build relationships and understand individual needs, including the type of nuanced adaptive practice that Mulholland outlines.

“If we are going to develop a workforce that is a lot more focused on relationships with children, then they need a form of professional development that is not just a one-off, going to a workshop and learning content, but actually having ongoing personal development,” says Castro-Kemp.

The approach to training and CPD that we have at the moment is one where “people simply don’t feel prepared”, she adds, and for a needs-based approach to flourish, that has to change.

‘Inclusive pedagogy means moving away from fixed-ability thinking’

Mulholland agrees that a pedagogy that is centred on relationships and really getting to know children requires a different type of professional development.

She proposes that schools allocate dedicated time for teachers to collaborate and discuss the progress of struggling learners. She points to examples like “focus five” children, where teachers prioritise a small group for targeted support. This approach, she explains, requires more built-in time for professional development that is continuous and personal, rather than ad hoc.

Ultimately, she says, the goal is not to define a static “inclusive school,” but to embrace inclusion as a dynamic process.

“If you keep saying to leaders, ‘you need to be an inclusive school’, that just feels overwhelming,” Mulholland explains.

“But if you say, ‘What do you think is really important about inclusion? And how do you measure it in your school?’ they will say things like ‘belonging’, ‘equity’, ‘community’, ‘thriving’, ‘achievement’. I do this with leaders all the time.

“So, for me, that’s the end state: children who achieve, they’re happy, they belong. Then you work backwards from there. That’s the process of inclusion - asking: ‘How do I get there?’”

Zofia Niemtus is a freelance writer

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