Partnerships in SEN: Are they working?

Professor David Galloway of the University of Durham reviews last year’s National Conference for Special Educational Needs, held at the University of Bath

Overview
This conference was another welcome opportunity at the end of the school year to stand back and review a perennial problem in provision for SEN. Four keynote speakers, two head teachers and two from universities, stimulated and provoked us to review our current practice. Their talks were complemented by the eight workshops, each repeated four times. The conference theme was partnership. It is a slippery concept. Everyone is in favour of partnerships and no one wants to accept responsibility when they don’t work. Yet clearly they don’t always work, either within schools, or between schools and other agencies. For me, the keynotes and workshops fell into three overlapping groups, each raising important questions about policy and practice.

Analysis and evaluation
Sally Tomlinson reminded us of the smooth teamwork advocated 23 years ago by the Warnock Report. Partnership implies equal access to information and knowledge, and equal involvement in decision making. Yet partnerships with children are rarely considered to be problematic in spite of the clear evidence that they frequently feel excluded from decision-making processes. Far from overcoming stigma, new terminology such as ADHD or autistic spectrum disorder may simply have widened the net. The education system both reflects and contributes to society, but society is not always willing to accept responsibility for its most vulnerable members.

In her workshop on children at risk, Ann Raymond pointed out that children with disabilities are at the greatest risk of abuse. A vignette of a young person in hospital vividly illustrated how the most difficult time to assert one’s rights is when we are at our most vulnerable. By extension, partnerships in SEN do not just require a coherent policy, but a culture which supports that policy.
This theme was developed in Charles Mead’s workshop on partnerships between mainstream and special schools. An exclusive society threatens economic stability and social stability, and also leads to personal tragedy. Yet the Village Partnership offers an example of successful partnerships between mainstream and special schools. A visionary project with its feet firmly on the ground, it showed how something can be done about the most intractable problems.

Values
Too often, children with SEN in secondary schools are known by a variety of derogatory labels such as “divs”, “rems”, “spackers”. Tony Evans brought us back to core values: ‘inclusion with sincerity’. Schools need to learn from what goes wrong, because that is what helps them to move forward. In a refreshing challenge, Karen Bastik-Styles argued that the teacher’s main job is not delivery of the national curriculum but to find ways of including students. Her reply to staff saying: “look what he’s done!” is to ask: “what have we done?”.

Encouragingly, some of the values that underpin that approach can also be seen in the Human Rights Act. Margaret Brown took us through the implications for admission policies, exclusions and SEN assessment. From a different perspective, Mike Blamires’ and Michael Farrell’s workshops explored the implications of partnerships with parents. A framework for parent – teacher partnerships is in place, but that is not enough. Mike Blamires explained how to help parents prepare for new SEN review meetings. Michael Farrell argued that we have to clarify the meaning of standards and progress; parents need evidence of progress.

Ways forward
As a teacher trainer, Phyllis Jones spoke with feeling about the unmanageability of the DFES’s Standards – over 800 of them – on ITT courses. There is a danger of a framework becoming a straightjacket, with no time for students to think about the implications of their classroom practice of concepts such as society, equality and disability. Yet Phyllis showed that it is possible to move beyond a ‘delivery’ model of teaching. Creativity and imagination are also important and can be developed with imaginative partnerships between ITT students, teachers and pupils.

Taking a different approach, Ron Weinstein’s workshop on ADHD and related issues emphasised the importance of analysing each child’s difficulty. In common with other sessions, he emphasised the importance of listening to the child’s point of view. Complementing Phyllis Jones’ argument, Max Timmerman and Sarah Packthall’s workshop on art with people with special needs also showed how access to the curriculum implies more than delivery. Respect and imaginative teaching can unlock the creative abilities of people with learning difficulties. Finally, Jenny Corbett showed how the best practice requires that at difficult times: “you have to hang on, you have to work through it”. That, though, can only happen if respect, valuing and listening are built into a school’s culture.

Conclusions
Partnership, today, operates in a cold climate. Sadly, the days when teachers could see themselves in partnership with central or local government have become a distant folk memory. Central government may talk about partnership, but the rhetoric that matters is about compliance, delivery and driving standards up. Local government has emerged from administering an education service to provision of education services but it, too, has its hands tied by central diktat. Is it too cynical to suggest that New Labour has discovered inclusion as the panacea to solve the problem of social exclusion created by the divisive policies established by the Conservative government and unswervingly maintained since then? Perhaps, but the imposed Standards which have spread like a rash across the education system from ITT courses to SENCO training betray a malignant mistrust of teachers on the part of Ministers and their advisers. A retired head teacher who worked with a major quango while it was developing a particularly unhelpful set of Standards told me in exasperation: “it’s ridiculous, but they are determined to make it wally proof; they really think that if they shove in enough standards, no wally will be able to get through!” It is a model of how not to establish partnerships.

The speakers and workshop leaders at this conference were realistic about the constraints but optimistic about the possibilities for overcoming them. In fairness to the present government and its Conservative predecessor, policies for partnership are now in place. Yet many schools had effective partnerships with parents, with other agencies and, most importantly, with their own pupils, before these policies were imposed, and it is all too easy for partnerships to wither in spite of the policies in place. For me, the most important message of the conference was that partnerships depend not primarily on policies but on people. How staff relate to each other determines how they relate to children, and also to parents. How they relate to children determines how children relate to each other. Legislation and school policies can facilitate partnerships, but cannot enforce them. Ultimately, partnerships are a product of the hidden curriculum of relationships between teachers, between teachers and pupils, between pupils, and between schools and their local communities.

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