The debate around evidence and SEND practice is much needed, not least because it is an area of education that requires us to think hard about the increasing number of children who require additional support.
It is important that we reflect continually on whether we are delivering the best education we can for them, within our organisations and as a system.
Schools Week’s investigation into the content of EHCPs and Ben Newmark’s accompanying provocation are important stimuli for discussion. However, we also need to carefully consider how we better develop our understanding of what is likely to have the greatest enduring impact on the children we teach.
And we need to do this not least because ‘SEND provision’ encompasses just as wide a range of organisational structures, content frameworks, pupil requirements and pedagogical approaches as the word ‘SEND’ encompasses developmental, communicative and behavioural needs.
As with many things that require us to think hard, it is often highly complex and nuanced.
It is beyond doubt that the use of evidence in education has become more commonplace. As a system, we are increasingly looking to organisations like the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) to provide us with evidence of impact.
We should be pleased about that, but we must also acknowledge that consuming other people’s knowledge and research isn’t always sufficient.
This is especially the case when we consider the uniqueness of the children we work with in special schools, whose responses to and relationships with learning are deeply individual.
As a sector, we therefore need to ensure that we consume other people’s thinking critically. That means we must evaluate the extent to which the participants in randomised control trials and the components of meta-analyses sufficiently reflect the children we teach and the contexts in which we teach them.
We must consume other people’s thinking critically
This applies to all the advice and information we receive, whether it comes from education or health, government, colleagues, commercial entities or indeed the EEF.
Beyond the thoughtful analysis of the applicability of the research available to us, we also need to recognise that sometimes things work for our pupils that may not have the same validity at scale. Equally, that which works at scale may not necessarily work for some of the individuals we teach.
As a specialist sector, it is essential that we consciously foster a broad relationship with evidence. We need to be evidence-consuming, evidence-creating and evidence-sharing.
This may mean abandoning approaches that seem plausible but have limited evidence of impact. And it may mean providing opportunities to explore the proof of concept for things that are having a positive impact at a local level but have not yet been tested at scale.
It may mean the formal evaluation of evidence bases associated with particular approaches through the lens of the context in which you work. And it may mean recognising that efficacy isn’t universally transferable; what works well can vary between individuals who appear to have similar requirements or diagnostic labels.
And it certainly must mean not just buying commercial solutions to pedagogical challenges, but instead building institutional knowledge over time through careful thought about complex things.
Because of the often magnified individuality of many of the children who attend special schools, specialist provision might not necessarily be an area of education that will lend itself well to an EEF-type approach. (It may work for some areas of what we do, but certainly not all.)
As such, it is important that we don’t casually hand over the responsibility for thinking hard to those elsewhere in the system. It needs to be rooted in our classrooms, our schools and our trusts.
And for that to happen, it must become a fundamental characteristic of our practice and of our professional identity.
Ours is an area of education that requires criticality, curiosity and a deeply intellectual approach to deciding what to do, when to do it and indeed when to stop.
Using research to support us to make best bets in the search for the right approach for children whose learning is complex is highly likely to be helpful.
But it is important that we don’t lose sight of the value of supplementing this through building our collective institutional knowledge, and our knowledge of the child, by thinking hard and thinking often.
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