Last week, a headteacher asked me a pertinent question: “What does it take to prepare for a more inclusive mainstream?”
A very thoughtful and productive discussion followed. We examined the reflections of the school’s teaching and learning lead and Sendco, who reported that good work was going on in the school using the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) approach to strengthen adaptive teaching.
The headteacher had confidence that all staff knew how to apply the recommendations within their practice, although they were unsure if this was having the intended impact on pupils’ learning experiences.
That’s when the concerns started to bubble to the surface.
“Sometimes the scaffolding isn’t specific enough,” I was told. “We have amazing practitioners, but some struggle to believe they can meet pupils’ needs, and worry they should be in a specialist setting”.
While the head recognised that teaching had improved, she wasn’t yet seeing the “inclusive impact” she had been hoping for - especially for pupils on SEND support.
In other words, the school had reached the same tipping point in their inclusive journey that I’ve seen many other schools reach.
The next big step for them will be to take their improved pedagogy of instruction and translate this into pedagogy of inclusion. But what does that look like?
To be truly inclusive, we need to better understand the diversity of learners and be actively curious about how those learners experience the curriculum and how this affects the decisions we make as teachers.
Direct instruction has, in many ways, codified teaching - but it can’t codify learning. Indeed, I’d argue that we often use a shared language for teaching that is focusing our attention on what the teacher does and knows at the expense of valuing what we can learn from the heterogeneity with which pupils acquire and use knowledge. We need to correct this imbalance.
I’m fully supportive of adaptive teaching as an extremely useful step on the journey to more equitable education. Yet it’s interesting to me that when teaching and learning leads and Sendcos work together closely, they often begin to identify gaps in their provision that reflect the need to move beyond adaptive teaching and develop a pedagogy that requires us to think far harder about how students respond to instruction.
That takes us back to our school leader’s question about what to do next. In addition to focusing on pedagogy, we discussed the need to allow the school’s culture, systems and structures to evolve in ways that would support and underpin inclusive teaching and learning.
Inclusive pedagogy allows us to build skills of noticing; of evidencing what works for marginalised learners; of hypothesising, testing and evaluating. It allows us to be systematically curious about learning. It encourages us to adopt the role of teacher as inquirer.
I’ve written before about the importance of having the right “disposition” for inclusion. In the book , Susan Hart identified the teaching characteristics associated with that disposition: developing trust, holding everybody in mind, seeing students as co-agents in learning and, most importantly, “transformability” (the capacity to identify strengths and not stigmatise pupils or limit their expectations).
These may sound like ”nice-to-haves” rather than essential traits, but if staff are to make moment-to-moment teaching decisions that are consistently and coherently inclusive, these are the traits they will need. These are the traits that make adaptive teaching effective. They are fundamental to inclusive pedagogy.
Cultivating these traits requires a significant shift in approach. Planning and teaching to include everyone takes more than a toolkit of strategies and pulling out the right one for the right child. It takes an enquiring mindset and valuing the learning environment. It takes opportunities to collaborate with others. Most of all, it takes practice.
Inclusive pedagogy is contingent on teachers having the chance to learn about their pupils.
For teachers to take that next step beyond adaptive teaching, it’s ultimately up to leaders to change school structures and systems to give staff the time and space to move forwards with inclusive practice. And an increasing number of school leaders are seeing this as an imperative.
Margaret Mulholland is the special educational needs and inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders.
