A few years ago, in the Golden Era of Edu-Twitter, Berny Andrews and I suggested the Department of Education needed a team of philosophers.

We were only half joking.

Very often the success or failure of educational strategy and policy is not in technical formulation or implementation but in purpose, and purpose is always about belief and philosophy.

I’m thinking about our crack team of edu-philosophers because I’m thinking about the possibility ECHPs might be removed as part of a drive to make our system more effective and more inclusive.

I understand why this might seem a good thing to do.

EHCPs are generally awful, and I am very on the record on saying so.

They are inconsistent and badly written, and most worryingly of all, the recent SchoolsWeek investigation revealed how immune they appear to have been to the evidence-informed movement that has led to improvements in many other areas.

Those that input into EHCPs appear to have little or no meaningful professional or personal accountability for their success or failure, which is hugely concerning given the legal powers they enjoy – if an ECHP says a school must do something then it must, regardless of whether that thing is useful or absolute rubbish, with the school alone held to account for its success or failure.

As something of an aside it’s interesting to note how this can place the law at odds with the SEND Code of Practice, which obligates us to remove barriers to learning.

The result of all this has been disastrous. Every year we spend more money on these plans while outcomes and experiences seem to get worse and worse.

Given all this it is unsurprising sensible people are considering ending the carnival and Shuting Down the Whole Thing.

Doing so – in theory – would lead to schools having more money and more say in how its spent and given how bad things are, the bar for better certainly feels quite low.

It’s also in line with my belief the best people to make decisions are almost always those closest to the problem.

Personally, I’d much rather my daughter’s SENCO and teacher decided what would best help her than a professional who might make their recommendations on an assessment lasting a couple of hours or less.

But – as things stand – I think removing EHCPs could be disastrous for our most vulnerable young people.

It surprises me a bit to find myself writing this, but even after some quite hard thinking, I’m confident we are too far away from a position where the benefits of making such a radical move would outweigh the risks.

My first reason is because the education system is the product of meritocratic structures and makes its most important compromises in the interests of those who find learning easiest. ECHPs remain one of the only formal ways in which resource is channelled away from life’s instrumentalist winners towards those who struggle.

Removing ECHPs and the associated individually ring-fenced funding would remove a layer of protection some children need in the hope improvements driven by generally more efficient spending would mean they wouldn’t need them anymore.

This feels very uncertain, firstly because I have significant doubts the wider system has the capacity and capability to improve its general inclusivity were it given more money to do so, because so much of SEND support intervention is formed from the same dubious evidence base the problematic strategies and practices in ECHPS come from too.

Getting rid of EHCPs won’t solve the bad practice problem. It will just result in the money being wasted by different people.

Secondly and even more worryingly, in a context of slashed budgets, unfunded pay-rises, expectation of further “efficiencies” and looming cuts I am not confident money saved by reducing or eliminating EHCPs would be spent on the most vulnerable learners were it detached from individual children. It doesn’t feel unreasonable to be concerned a primary driver of this might – even if this wasn’t the initial intent – turn out to be the desire to reduce overall education costs.

Given how under pressure we all are to reduce costs it feels deeply unlikely the billions saved would all go back into schools.

But plausibly, schools might see some of it.

If this were to happen I think it is possible provision for many and perhaps most children would improve, but this brings me back to the philosophy I began with – I worry that this utilitarian improvement would come with what J S Mill called “The Tyranny of the Majority” – really terrible experiences and outcomes for the very most vulnerable children who would find themselves stripped of their only protection.

A few years ago, I read a story about a woman who – after a terrible and disfiguring accident – was being considered for the world’s first facial transplant. The issue was that to make this viable what remined of her own face would have to be completely removed first. This would be worth it if the transplant was certain to work but it wasn’t and if it failed then she would be left with no face at all – an almost unimaginably horrifying prospect.

I see a similar risk in the removal of ECHPs in the hope that what will replace them will be better – perhaps it will – but what happens if it isn’t? What happens to our very most vulnerable children if schools don’t become inclusive enough to accommodate them if they don’t have personally linked funding?

I really worry this sort of thing might directly affect my family.

I worry in a few years we may find our choices for my daughter are reduced to mainstream with no extra help, or a Special School, when what we might want is for her to attend a mainstream school with a level of extra help that can only be provided with money allocated directly to her.

I hope my worries are unfounded.

Perhaps a plan will emerge that offers people like B better protection and support in a different way to the deeply flawed ECHP system.

But perhaps not and I think the risks of this must be very, very clearly understood and mitigated against if families like mine are going to have confidence things will get better as a result of change. We will need to be reassured this will not turn into a cost-cutting exercise that benefits other children at the expense of our own – that our own kids won’t become the minority to Mill’s tyrannical majority.

Personally, I’d far prefer we began by cleaning up what’s in ECHPs and holding those who input into them to account before we seriously consider getting rid of them entirely.

Sadly, one thing families like ours understand well is that no matter how bad things seem, they can always get worse.

In 1429 a French peasant with no military experience led an army against the Anglo-Burgundians, driving them from their bastion and forcing them to retreat across the Loire River.

At the age of thirteen she began hearing voices sent by God. They gave her a sacred mission to save France by expelling its enemies and installing its rightful king.

She was later captured and burnt at the stake.

This young woman is popularly known as Joan of Arc.

It’s a strange story, but perhaps not as strange to her contemporaries as it is to us – the medieval world was far more comfortable with miracles, visions, voice and direct divine intervention than we are today.

Our post enlightenment unease about the mystic and strange makes us seek explanation that makes sense in our very different paradigm, and a very common question asked about Joan today is whether she might have been schizophrenic – it’s the sort of question I’d expect from a curious, lively-minded Year 8 learning about her for the first time in a history lesson.

Oh dear.

What happens next might go something like this.

“3-2-1 all eyes on me and pens down – listen carefully. Historians generally don’t like to ask questions like this because all diseases and afflictions are socially constructed by us. The term schizophrenia was first used by a Swiss psychiatrist named Eugen Bieuler to describe a collection of symptoms he observed in some of his patients, including hallucinations, delusions and muddled thoughts. The term was first used in 1908, nearly five hundred years after the life of Joan of Arc. Bieuler did not know what caused it and even today we don’t have one test for it. We still don’t really know what it is. Asking whether Joan of Arc was schizophrenic doesn’t’ make sense because schizophrenia did not exist when she did. Her explanation of visions from God is valid and useful in the world she lived in where people believed this sort of thing happened quite often.”

Pity my Year 8, right!

I suspect my answer might make them and their classmates wish the question had never been asked, because there isn’t the sort of straight, easy answer young people like but, because I think it both interesting and important, I subject them to it anyway.

This – to a greater or lesser extent – is true of almost all diseases and illnesses.

Having modern terms for them doesn’t mean we have found some sort of empirical truth – indeed post modernists would have us believe there is no such thing at all – they’d say all truth is constructed by us.

Does this mean that we should embrace as sort of nihilism and abandon the pretence entirely?

Should we stop using terms like schizophrenia because they’re socially constructed?

No.

This would be big mistake because doing so would mean us denying all truths created by humans.

There are a great, great many of these and we need them.

Language philosopher J L Austin explored this in a series of lectures he gave in 1955, in which he coined the term “Performative Utterances.”

Austin defined these as words or phrases that just don’t merely describe reality but change it.

His best know example might be the words in a marriage ceremony. When a vicar says, “I pronounce you man and wife”, he or she is not just describing something that empirically already exists but changing reality itself.

Where a moment before there were two legally single people, there is now a married couple.

Whether or not you agree with the concept of marriage there is no doubt – within the context of our society – it is real. It is a reality we rely on and has very powerful social and legal ramifications.

We need it.

Whether or not there is an empirically “true”, perhaps even divinely defined concept called marriage is irrelevant because it is real in this almost entirely socially constructed world.

But this does not make it a free for all.

Validity and authority are – as J L Austin points out – integral to the validity and usefulness of socially constructed concepts. Children role-playing a marriage ceremony on a playdate don’t run the risk of transforming reality and becoming married by accident, because anyone performing a marriage ceremony must be given legal authority to do it and to get this, they must pass through well understood and agreed processes themselves.

For something to be real and therefore useful the legitimacy of the processes of construction must be understood and accepted.

This is why marriage is a useful term.

Schizophrenia is also a useful term because the diagnosis is arrived at by a well-understood framework of methods consistent between medical practitioners and it allows access to powerful and effective treatments that can demonstrably improve the lives of those who suffer from the condition.

What then of the terms we use in education?

Are these useful?

Many are, if they are used correctly and as intended.

For example, the term Pupil Premium is useful because it is a mechanism by which extra funding and support are directed to schools serving populations of greater social disadvantage. The processes used to assign a child with pupil premium status are shared and well understood which means we can use it as a good rule of thumb measure of provision and performance gaps.

Pupil Premium – like marriage and schizophrenia – is a useful term when it is understood and used appropriately.

Other terms are messier.

Let’s begin with dyslexia.

The NHS defines dyslexia as a common learning difficulty affecting up to one in ten people, causing problems with reading, writing and spelling. Its symptoms – again this comes from the NHS – include reading and writing slowly, mixing up the order of letters in words, being confused by letters that look similar and writing similar looking letters such as b and d the wrong way round.

The causes of dyslexia are controversial and its interesting to note how careful the language used by the NHS is – its website says, “it is thought certain genes inherited from your parents may act together in a way that affects how some parts of the brain develop”, a sentence which while superficially clear is full of cautionary qualifiers.

This uncertainty has led some researchers to argue dyslexia does not exist as a medical condition and instead is related to the great complexity of the English phonic code which makes it especially hard to learn compared to most other languages.

There is broad and helpful consensus that difficulties experienced by those with dyslexia are identical to those experienced by almost all emerging readers, which is why the strategies recommended by the NHS are the same – the most important being the expert, targeted teaching of phonics along with lots of shared reading and overlearning.

So, does dyslexia exist?

It’s irrelevant.

Who cares?

Whether there is a medical condition called dyslexia or not, the term is useful and without it many people would be worse off.

This is because – wrongly in my view, but here my feelings don’t matter – we live in a brutally meritocratic world that places value and virtue on people being clever.

In this world those struggling to read without an explanation as to why are understandably fearful of being labelled as stupid given how mainstream scorn and ridicule of those who find learning hard is – think how accepted terms like retard, moron, cretin and idiot are compared to slurs attacking gender and race.

People with dyslexia talk about this a lot, about how relieved they were when they learned the reason they found reading so hard when others they knew found it so easy was not their fault.

The term dyslexia is useful, firstly because it is protective and secondly because it opens up avenues of good support. Those diagnosed with dyslexia can be given more expert targeted phonics instruction, more paired and small-group intervention and, with patience and hard work, will improve their reading.

Stripping them of their dyslexia identifier might well make these interventions less likely to succeed because it could lead to them internalising the idea they are “stupid”, affecting their confidence and making it less likely they would commit to programmes and interventions we have good evidence are helpful.

So, despite the complexity and controversy, dyslexia is a useful term and because it is we should continue using it.

While I know this might frustrate people, I have no interest in debating the medical status of dyslexia because to me it is unimportant.

But the utility of terms for many other educational difficulties are much more questionable because they are less well defined and because the interventions and strategies used to address them are not helpful and can – mainly through opportunity cost – even do harm.

Let’s explore some of these, beginning with a condition called Meares-Irlen Syndrome or sometimes Visual Stress, commonly diagnosed in children who find reading difficult to learn.

Finding a clear description of this is hard online with much ambiguity and even contradiction in the sites returned by a google search. The British and Irish Orthoptic Society links to a Warrington and Halton NHS Hospital factsheet which says:

“Visual stress (pattern-related visual stress, sometimes incorrectly called ‘Meares-Irlen Syndrome’ or ‘Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome’) is the experience of unpleasant visual symptoms when reading, especially for prolonged periods. Symptoms include illusions of shape, movement and colour in the text, distortions of the print, loss of print clarity, and general visual irritation. Visual stress can also cause sore eyes, headaches, frequent loss of place when reading and impaired comprehension. Visual stress is thought to be caused by the striped effect of black writing on white paper which causes over stimulation and excitation of the visual cortex.”

The factsheet goes on to say these symptoms are likely to be alleviated by tinted lenses in glasses or through coloured overlays, and that earlier controversy around these was resolved by scientific studies conducted by Professor Arnold Wilkins of the University of Essex in the 1990s.

The sheet links to a website of unclear provenance, which says about 5% of children may read up to 25% faster with a coloured overlay than without one, with no clear link to the study’s methodology, which I’d especially like to see given the suspiciously round figures.

The claim controversy around the condition and the coloured paper and lenses commonly used to treat it has been resolved is not reflected in more recent literature.

The most up-to-date review I could find, published in 2016 in the US National Library of Medicine concludes “the use of coloured lenses or overlays to ameliorate reading difficulties cannot be endorsed and that any benefits reported by individuals in clinical settings are likely to be the result of placebo, practice or Hawthorne effects.”

Further investigation bears this out – the consensus beyond those professionally or financially invested in advocating for the existence of such conditions is that there is no evidence for Visual Stress, Meares-Irlen Syndrome or that tinted lenses, or coloured paper makes reading easier.

The brazen doublethink can be astonishing.

Dyslexia UK – a company offering paid for private assessments for dyslexia even says “A number of research studies have investigated Visual Stress and have concluded that there is a lack of evidence that Visual Stress exists. They have also not found proof that treatments, such as Irlen lenses, are effective in helping people with reading difficulties”, but then goes on to advise assessment for the condition by a qualified optometrist anyway.

Here the validity of diagnostic processes is important because the associated outcomes are not useful to those subjected to them – they move emphasis from what we have good evidence for – like phonics instruction, to strategies like coloured lenses and papers we have no evidence for and are likely to make it harder for those having trouble reading to access helpful provision.

They may even construct difficulties and even disabilities in those who do not have them.

I have taught many children maintaining they are unable to read black text on white backgrounds. This is a very significant concern given that once they leave school, they enter a world in which they are unlikely to be given all the information they require on the coloured paper they have been taught to believe they need.

So, are there such things as Meares-Irlen Syndrome or Visual Stress?

The answer is almost certainly no, and this is important not because being empirically right or wrong is important but because such a diagnosis is likely to lead to worse provision and outcomes and so isn’t useful.

A child with this identifier is less likely to get support in reading we do know works because of the almost certainly incorrect belief that the coloured resources will do the job.

Sadly, education is full of similarly problematic pseudo-scientific diagnostic procedures and associated labels and if anything, they are increasing.

A big driver of this is the lack of substantive standardisation around many commonly used terms which are often used as descriptive catch-alls for things we have no real understanding of.

For example, while severe, mild and moderate learning difficulty are common identifiers on school SEND registers, there is no agreed process by which such labels are assigned to children, making any meaningful conversation about how to best help children assigned them impossible at systemic scale.

It is worrying how hard it is to get examples of how such determinations are made beyond a general sense they are for children who do not do well on tests, which could be for any number or combination of reasons including poor teaching itself.

This problem is surprisingly poorly understood.

Many commentators and even experienced school and systemic leaders seem unaware SEND registers are not products of well-understood and shared processes leading to robust, useful definitions but the subjective opinions of a vast range of individuals with little shared knowledge – for example a group of school governors I talked with recently were genuinely shocked to hear that a high number of pupils on a schools SEND register labelled as having learning difficulties was not in itself a useful explanation for a school’s poor performance in national examinations.

It might be assumed greater involvement and input of professionals such optometrists, educational psychologists and SEND specialists would provide more clarity but, unfortunately, these often create even more confusion. Many do not have standardised procedures either and the diagnostic terms they arrive at are often just as disputed as those used by teachers and schools.

There is significant debate and controversy around increasingly commonly used sciency sounding terms such as sensory processing difficulty, slow processing, trauma and attachment disorder, among lots of other labels found on documents such as pupil passports and EHCPs.

Sometimes there is debate about the existence of such conditions at all, and even when there is broad agreement about existence, there is disagreement about the specifics, making the terms of no practical use because the people using them don’t share an understanding of what they mean.

This is something else not systemically well understood by parents, school leaders, teachers or – too often – even those working within SEND departments in school.

The underpinning paradigm is that the diagnostic processes and the associated identifications are as sound and useful as medical diagnoses are, with robust and powerful interventions or treatments available to those assigned the labels. Philosophically this may well be because we have a medical model of educational deficit and disability that locates issues in learning within those who find it more difficult rather than the provision they receive.

This would not be so bad if those using these terms did not imply they were akin to medical diagnosis and did not mislead with statistics aping this different discipline. There was a good example of this in a recent training session I attended online on trauma, in which the presenter said, “bottling up stress and emotions increases risk of cancer by 50%.”

This – of course – is utter nonsense and isn’t even something that could be studied.

At best this is an unethical interpretation of a study that exists and at worst it’s just made up.

There is even evidence of this problem in the job title of the person in each school leading on special educational needs and disabilities – the SENDCO.

The “Co” bit is for “co-ordinator”, which implies the job is more enacting the advice of others rather than making decisions themselves about what might best help struggling children do better in the school context.

The underpinning principle is the idea children who find learning harder do so because they are fundamentally different to other children and that meeting their needs means finding out what’s “wrong” and then doing additional and/or different things to fix them.

As I began with, whether this was empirically true or not wouldn’t matter if the help children got because of the labels assigned to them benefited them, but – while it does for some, for example as it may do for blind and deaf children – it often doesn’t.

Instead, a determination or identification can easily lead to worse provision.

First, there is inevitable genericism when schools feel they are expected to enact lots of different strategies developed by lots of different professionals in contexts they have little experience in. The result is the construction of the “SEND learner”, who despite not existing has – nonetheless – great importance to the way schools attempt to meet the needs of those struggling to make progress in school.

Who then is this SEND learner? Not the highly academi blind boy in 9A, and not the wheelchair using girl in 8B either.

No, not these children.

Instead, the child is more likely to be boy, more likely to be Pupil Premium, more likely to behave badly, more likely to be summer born and – of course – much more likely to do badly on exam and tests.

What help do these children get because of identification? Do they get the best teachers timetabled to their classes? Do they get whole school policy formed in their best interests? Are the research bases for the interventions and additional and different strategies imposed on them rigorously interrogated, tested and assessed for impact?

Sadly, the answer to this is often no, and this is why commercial programmes like “Squiggle While You Wiggle” and “Write Dance” appear on the EHCPs of children like my daughter who finds writing hard, when what she needs is more supervised, encouraging practise to strengthen the muscles in her hands.

Thank goodness she goes to a school who know this.

Before going further, it is important and fair to acknowledge some commonly deployed techniques, programmes and strategies that are of no or little benefit to the children subjected to them may have value if applied properly, but this is often very tough to do and so is understandably rare. 

An illuminating example of this can be seen in “movement breaks”, which seem to be appearing increasingly frequently in SEND support and EHCPs. Conclusions on the efficacy of these are predictably hard to find because – again predictably – there is no shared understanding of what a movement break is.

Is it having PE, drama and music on the timetable?

Is it walking between lessons?

Is it a twenty-minute break in the morning and a forty-minute lunch?

These are embedded features of the way most schools organise themselves which means if we use the loosest definition there is no obligation to change anything at all.

If the definition is tightened to mean movement breaks within lessons things get messier.

Here, research that shows any potential benefit to learning examines structured breaks led by a teacher – there are some cute videos of small Chinese children doing these doing the rounds on the internet if you want to see what this looks like.

Would doing something like this be useful for children who find learning harder? Perhaps – but the evidence isn’t conclusive and incorporating such practice into a school would require a lot of work and feels like it would have a high potential for failure.

I’m not aware of any English schools even trying – if any are they’re very rare.

Instead, much more common are schools allowing some individual children to get up and move round the classroom or perhaps use an exit pass to go outside for an agreed period to wander about.

There is no evidence this does any good whatsoever – I’d be surprised if anybody had even thought it worth researching because the negatives are so obvious.

Allowing it has at worst the potential for disruption and disorder and at the very best significant opportunity cost, because if a child isn’t in a lesson doing what their teacher is telling them to do, they can’t learn anything.

The evidence base for some other commonly recommended strategies and techniques is even weaker.

Fidget Toys are a good example.

These emerged as a craze five or so years ago, have not gone away and are often still included in SEND support and even in EHCPs for children who have trouble paying attention.

Here, the consensus is clear – beyond the theoretical there is no evidence these do any good at all and reasonably strong evidence they make it harder for children to attend to their learning.

The point of all this is the leap between identifying a child as having a SEND need and helping them is a yawning chasm – we cannot assume identification does any good and must be open to the plausibility it might do harm.

We must consider the very real plausibility that identifying a child with a SEND need makes their education not better, but worse.

We must also be open to the possibility this may be part of the reason that while SEND spending continues to increase, we are not seeing better outcomes or experiences for the children and families in the system. If identifications and associated interventions aren’t useful then spending more on them will just waste money.

Of course, schools need more money but without reform in the way it is spent more funding will not have a proportionate impact.

And we need it to.  

Recently, my wife and I have been advised to pursue an ADHD diagnosis for our daughter who has Williams Syndrome and certainly does finds paying and sustaining attention much more difficult than most of her friends.

I suspect those doing the advising – outside of her school who understand perfectly – are bemused by our reluctance, but perhaps this talk has allowed you to understand why we might choose not to.

Would it help her?

Would it lead to more robust teaching, more careful prioritisation of curriculum and interventions that help her concentrate for longer? Or would it lead to badly conceptualised movement breaks and fidget spinners to occupy her, so she doesn’t bother others or get in their way?

Would it lead to pressure for us to put her on a potentially lifelong path of medication which is something as parents we absolutely do not want. Even if such a diagnosis were to help her in the short term how sure can we be that in the years ahead it won’t lower expectations and become an excuse for why she can’t do the things others can?

Does it even matter what we do?

Do we even have the power to stop this happening, or will she be labelled informally by her teachers and others who work with her whatever we do? If it’s inevitable, do we go for the diagnosis as the lesser of two evils so we can try and exert more control?

So many questions. So much we don’t know. So much trepidation and fear about what the future holds for our lively, inquisitive, curious eight-year-old girl and what the world will make of her – what people like you will make of her and who she is.

Do the schools you lead think about this sort of stuff as much as we do? Does it keep you up at night? While we don’t need you to lose sleep, we’d like you to think about the same things we do about Bessie for the children and families you are responsible for – the children with the least amount of time to waste, requiring expert instruction more than anyone else.

It’d really help us out if you did.

Part 2: Beyond Labels.

I began by explaining why asking whether a condition is real is going about things the wrong way, because what’s important is whether identifying anyone with anything is useful not whether it is real.

This is a good place to start thinking about solutions too.

Children who believe they need – for example – coloured paper to read are not usually lying.

It would be very unwise and perhaps even cruel for a school to announce that because there isn’t good evidence the coloured paper helps, its teachers will just stop providing it to the children who believe they need it.

This is unlikely to do any good and likely to do harm, because the removal of something the child and their family truly believes helps them will generate hurt, confusion and anger and this would make them less and not more likely to commit to strategies for which there is better evidence.

It would probably be more effective and kinder to continue providing the paper to those used to working this way while ensuring the child is also receiving more robust intervention. It would also be both kind and ethical to explain to these children and families that beyond Placebo and Hawthorne effects there isn’t good evidence such an approach is useful and the potential long-term consequences of such beliefs, so if they choose to continue, they are at least doing so from a more informed position.

People are absolutely entitled to believe anything they want to about themselves if they find the belief useful, and while schools can and should share knowledge with their communities, they should not attempt to persuade people they are not who they think they are. Many, many people find a diagnosis or identification hugely helpful because it helps them better understand themselves and gives them access to a community of shared experience where there is both emotional and practical support.

The sticking point is where the right of humans to be whoever they want to be runs up against the inherently collectively organised educational system which cannot be organised around what everyone wants without revolution.

I think there are plenty of people who believe the only way forward is revolution – those who believe that children learn in radically different ways to each other and that any system that doesn’t orientate itself towards highly personalised education for all is doomed to failure – as something of an aside this is why I think innovations in AI are so seductive.

These people think differences between children are under-identified and I can’t help wondering whether those giving advice – and there’s always so much advice – are even interested in helping improve the real-life ways in which schools and classrooms operate and how best to help struggling young people access them better.

At my most uncharitable I’ve even wondered whether a sort of moral purity is more important to them – a belief saying what they should think happen in their personal edutopia is fighting the good fight, leaving people like us to find concrete, realistic ways that improve the experience of vulnerable young people we professionally and often personally care about very much.

There is a powerful and persuasive lobby that’s been successful in convincing many young people and their families they are fundamentally and immutably different to others, and that without recognition of this they cannot succeed.

This is claim that – at best – is open to challenge.

But just telling the people who believe this they are wrong will not help and attempts to do so are driving much of the antagonism between families and schools.

It’s an unwise approach.

Moving forward requires us to steer clear of bunfights over whether things are real or not real, move beyond general identification and diagnosis and instead focus on the specific educational difficulties faced by individual children and deal with these whatever we or they believe about their origins.

Families, schools and other professionals all want children to succeed so instead of being drawn into fruitless and often hurtful arguments we should find ways to make children successful.

Before anything else schools must have – at least – a strong shared understanding of the ways in which they identify children with Special Educational Needs so that its possible to have meaningful conversations about the most effective ways to help them. All too often this is simply not the case with a lack of consistency within a school or MAT meaning there isn’t any shared meaning around the terms used.

When this is the case identifying labels become dangerous distractors.

Regardless of a diagnosis or label what’s almost always needed first is what’s often called quality teaching or universal provision. I’ve written about what I think this means elsewhere and in summary it means calm, consistent, dignified and predictable environments and clear instruction broken down into digestible chunks with responsive teaching – hard to accomplish but essential for all children and especially those who experience the most difficulty when trying to learn.

It also means reviewing curriculum with the interests of those who find learning hardest prioritised, because many of the issues experienced by these children originate in planning that thinks first of those who find learning easiest.

This issue was raised by Professor Dylan Wiliam in 2020, when he said at an online ResearchED conference:

““They actually make sure there’s enough stuff in the curriculum for the fastest-learning students to be occupied all year. And so there’s far too much for most students. I think that’s logically consistent but immoral. When the curriculum’s too full, you have to make a professional decisions about what stuff you’re going to leave out, and the important point here is that not all content is equally important.”

This – of course – requires schools to be even more expert.

Schools that do these things well are likely to find the number of children requiring additional support will be far lower than those where the basics are not in place minimising issues caused by inconsistent labelling.

And all schools would benefit from honestly reviewing practice in their classrooms to ensure this vital first stage is in place -all too often this is just assumed.

In a classroom in which the basics are not in place the conditions and labels assigned to children is likely to be irrelevant – it’s not possible for additional-different provision to compensate for substandard general teaching.

Where adjustment, adaptation and intervention are necessary, these should be based on the specific educational challenges faced by children and not general terms for which there is little if any shared understanding.

We should stop talking about general characteristics of children who are Pupil Premium or have sensory processing disorders, dyslexia or ADHD or autism and instead focus on the specific challenges they face.

Schools are not hospitals or clinics and should not be in the business of identifying medical or pseudo-medical conditions.

That is not their job.

They don’t have the capacity to do it and where they are complicit in it, they should stop.

Instead, schools should be looking at the specific problems children have with learning and looking at specific solutions to those problems regardless of any identifier.

A dyslexic child’s problem is not dyslexia. It’s reading. Help them with that.

A child’s ADHD isn’t their problem. Concentrating might be. Help them with that.

What does it matter if a child’s distress around loud noises and big crowds is due to autism? Isn’t the problem the environment she finds upsetting? Fix that.

None of this is easy and we should not understate the scale of the challenge.

At an event last year, I was quite rightly scalded by Gary Aubrin for saying that much of the answers we need are “just” good teaching.

Gary’s point to me was there is no such thing. Teaching is hard to do well. Running good schools is hard too. There is a huge job of work for most of us just in this and until we’ve all got on top of this, nothing else matters.

Answers are hard to find, which is why we need those who lead teaching and learning in schools to be experts not just co-ordinators – they must have the knowledge and competence to know what best helps those who struggle.

And regrettably they must also be guards against those claiming expertise who either don’t have it at all or have it in contexts so different to schools their advice isn’t useful. This means not taking claims made by others at face value – it means having expertise to question and interpret studies, papers and the associated advice as I hope I’ve tried to do here.

It requires leadership not just co-ordination.

It requires leaders in school to know how identifications are arrived at and what the consequences are for those assigned these identifications. They must evaluate the impact of strategies and interventions, and they must be prepared to end them if they aren’t helping even when – especially when – they face pressure from others to continue with them even in the face of failure.

This is in support of and not in breach of the SEND code of practice, which legally requires us to remove barriers to learning, but it does means being courageous enough to stand up to well-meaning but damaging generalisations such as “he’s got a learning difficulty so he can’t do that”, or “his ADHD means he won’t be able to,” or “he’s not been diagnosed but you can just tell he’s on the spectrum”, whoever they come from.

We must not make claims that aren’t useful or acquiesce to those making such claims if these don’t lead to better provision.

Personally, I feel I understand the tensions quite well. Seven years ago, my daughter was diagnosed with Williams Syndrome, and this has taken me on quite a journey.

To begin with I wanted so much to believe she was different in exciting ways to others – that her genetic deletion and associated learning disability would be compensated for by special talents and an interesting, unique way of learning.

I was wrong.

She is – of course as all children are –  unique and special but as we’ve discovered more about her, taking part in academic studies and working with experts in her condition, we’ve learned she has much in common with other children the same age.

She finds some things more difficult than most, but she doesn’t learn in a fundamentally different way.

Why did I not want to believe this when we first got her diagnosis?

I can’t be sure because memories are tricky, slippery things but I suspect it was because the idea of a learning disability felt shameful, and I wanted there to be compensations.

It’s hard to say that because it’s an admission there was something about my daughter, I was not able to accept. That I had the arrogance to want her to be something of my own making and not herself.

I’m ashamed of ever thinking it.

More important than my shame is if I had allowed myself to persist in this belief then perhaps, I’d have allowed her to be exposed to things that did not help her.

Perhaps she’d be squigging while she wiggles but wouldn’t be able to write as well.

Perhaps she wouldn’t be able to read because we wouldn’t have made phonics instruction such a priority for her school and us.

When I think of the joy she’s now experiencing reading road-signs and the names of songs she sees appearing on the display of the car stereo, of the little book she carries round to write her thoughts in, when I think of all this I’m struck breathless by the possibility she might not be able to do these things as well had I not been able to let go of my first, shameful framing.

My daughter has Williams Syndrome.

It’s the least important thing about her.

We all know teachers should have high expectations of pupils.

Teachers who think their pupils can learn and do lots set more challenging work than those doubting their capacities and this leads to more progress.

Nobody – quite rightly – argues against high expectations.

Officially you can’t even be a teacher if you don’t have them – they’re in the Teacher Standards.

But high expectations aren’t the same thing to everyone. Given the huge variability in our education system how could they be?

Different teachers and schools demand different levels of effort and have differing standards on acceptable general behaviour.

But we don’t talk about it well because being accused of having low expectations isn’t just an observation – in teaching it’s a personal and professional insult.

Describing someone as having “low expectations” is damning, meaning at heart we think the person is not a good practitioner.

Thinking about whether we have high enough expectations makes us angry and defensive.

But it shouldn’t – ideally there would be no reason to take it so personally because our expectations are more products of our environments and experiences than deeply held and immutable core beliefs.

If we have always been managed by terrible bullying bosses, then we will expect future bosses to be terrible and bullying. If we have always hated exercise, then we will expect a new sort of exercise to be horrible.

Conversely if we have always enjoyed Indian food, we’ll be excited a newly opened Keralan restaurant and if we’ve always liked science fiction films and loved Dune 1 then we’re more likely to rush to see Dune 2.

The point is expectations are not ethereal or objective – they are set by what we have seen and experienced before.

This is true of standards in schools.

If a teacher has only ever worked in schools in which behaviour is poor, they are far more likely to think this normal than a teacher who has only worked in schools where behaviour is excellent. If a leader has never worked in a place in which the completion of lots of outside school study is normalised they are far less likely to believe children capable of it and more likely to be satisfied with less and lower quality work.

This makes it hard for people to change their expectations – telling someone their expectations are too low doesn’t usually work because this is rhetoric against experience, which is a battle that only ever has one winner.

Our experiences are very powerful.

If you’ve worked in or led a school in which students angrily swear at staff regularly or where violence is not uncommon it can be very hard to believe much better is possible. When there are a lot of dysregulated children behaving chaotically the idea it’s possible for a school to be truly calm and orderly can seem absurd.

To these people – those struggling to stay afloat in the most challenging of circumstances – the idea other places have succeeded where they have apparently failed is often laughable and it’s logical to explain examples of success away; perhaps their demographic is radically different or perhaps they are faster to exclude the children who are most challenging. Perhaps they have more resources. Perhaps they just have more staff.

This is complicated because such explanations might be true.

But sometimes they are not.

Even in the areas of highest challenge children can behave as well and work as hard, but knowing this often means experiencing it.

Some schools are genuinely turning the dial, but for lots of reasons it can be hard to accept this.

This problem isn’t unique to teaching.

Prior to the Joseph Lister’s pioneering work on antiseptics the death of very large numbers of patients after surgical procedures from infection was regarded by doctors as sad but inevitable. When Lister began achieving astonishing survival rates it was natural some of the first reactions were of disbelief; firstly, the improvement seemed too good to be true, and secondly the idea tiny invisible “microbes” could kill a powerful fully grown man was logically absurd.

These sceptical reactions were not a demonstration of low expectations – they were a sensible and entirely reasonable reaction to something they had no reason to believe and would have been fools to take on face value, especially when the new methods slowed surgeons down.

The initially sceptical are not the villains. The villains of the story are those who refused to look at the evidence or to change their practice even after it became clear a huge breakthrough had been made.

Why didn’t they change? It’s impossible to be certain. Perhaps they had wrapped up their personal egos in their professional status which meant they felt any admission of prior mistakes reflected on them as people. Perhaps they were overcompetitive and couldn’t deal with the idea a rival had found something they missed.

Lister’s attitude was not helpful. Arrogant, contemptuous and dismissive he called his peers “murderers”, which led to further defensiveness and entrenchment.

There’s lots to learn from this.

It’d probably be better if we viewed our expectations as expressions of our past experiences rather than expressions of our moral characters. Given all the rhetoric this isn’t easy. Quite recently a friend of mine questioned whether my expectations were as high as his, which for a second made me bristle until I thought about it and realised his perspective was different because he had spent much more time working in schools achieving excellent outcomes than I had.

It wasn’t personal.

Not taking things as personally would make it all much easier to talk about – easier to admire others and learn from them – easier to understand and appreciate nuance and context.

Those achieving brilliant things shouldn’t get carried away either – they should remember their results are better not because they are better people but because they have had the privilege of a different perspective.

It isn’t easy to get to this point – accountability metrics in England are inherently competitive and create winners and losers with all the associated hurt and hubris.

But education isn’t a game and when we play it like it is the losers are the children we all want the best for.

It is hard to talk about things when people don’t have a shared understanding of the words they use, and words usually don’t mean anything on their own – terminology is only given meaning through practical examples.

Two people – for example – both thinking they work at “warm-strict” schools can find differences in how they interpret the phrase mean their disciplinary systems have very little in common.

Discussion of “inclusion” is affected by this ambiguity, because the people using it often mean very different things.

What is an inclusive classroom?

To get to a point where this can be a meaningful question, definitions and examples are needed to avoid misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

On its own the word “inclusion” means nothing.

To be included or excluded there must be something to be included in or excluded from.

Alone, inclusion is only a word in an unfinished sentence.

Schools have multiple functions, and this makes assessing how inclusive they are tricky; a school can be more inclusive in some aspects of its practice than it is in others.

A friend of mine who works for Children’s Services helped me understand this a couple of years back, after I expressed frustration about internal truancy at the school I was working at and how being in the building was pointless if children in it weren’t learning.

He pointed out things weren’t as simple – that many of the vulnerable children he worked with were more of a danger to themselves and others if they weren’t under adult supervision at school. He recognised these children probably weren’t learning much in the schools he placed them in, but for them the protective function of a school was more important.

His definition of inclusion was different to mine and so were his success indicators. This is a tension I’m not comfortable with but get and respect.

Inclusion in classrooms is easier to understand because the primary purpose of classrooms is learning.

To be inclusive the children in them must learn.

Creating and sustaining an inclusive classroom is difficult at the best of times.

Children often lack an inherent drive to learn what is on a school curriculum, and many would often prefer to be elsewhere.

Children who would rather be doing other things are not unusual or deficient. Nothing has gone wrong if they don’t want to do algebra or osmosis. It is normal for children to want to do stuff they want to do more than stuff they don’t. This means teachers often have reluctant audiences and must be skilled at directing their attention and motivating them.

If a history teacher fails to spot a child is drawing anime characters in their jotter instead of answering a question on the feudal system, they are not included. If a child daydreams away the day and nobody intervenes, they’ve not been included even if they have been present in every lesson. If a child can’t read the text a teacher gives them and then copies out the questions instead of answering them, they have not been included.

Before getting anywhere near SEND designation and the specific difficulties some children face in learning it’s important to understand issues around inclusion in classrooms affect all children – not just a few, and that the degree of inclusion and exclusion to learning children experience day-to-day and lesson-by-lesson varies and fluctuates.

Inclusion is a continuum, affects all children and changes over time.

The continuum is affected by the teacher, the behaviour of children, the curriculum and lots of other things too.

It’s possible for a classroom to be more inclusive on Monday than it is on Wednesday and for it to be less inclusive in the first half of the lesson than it is in the second. If there is a topic on the curriculum that lots of children are naturally interested in, then it may be easier to make the room more inclusive than if it is a topic that’s less compelling, and this may vary from child to child.

The learning vulnerabilities of children change over time too – something as simple as the normal fluctuations in a child’s mood can make it easier or harder for a teacher to include them in the lesson – techniques that worked fine one week may not work as well or even at all the next week.

Neither inclusion nor exclusion are fixed states, and so trying to become inclusive as if this were a threshold to cross is to set an impossible aim, because the conditions affecting it change all the time and however inclusive a classroom is there is always more that could be done.

Instead of trying to become “inclusive”, teachers should aim to be more inclusive more of the time and work on strategies and practices that make this more likely.

Seeing things this way means better professional conversations and better decision making, because it removes the moral coding the term has assumed, which leads to defensiveness and theatrical performativity for other adults.

It also means people can talk more honestly about where they really are without fear of a potentially humiliating judgement, and might allow them to look at small, specific things they can do to move on the continuum without feeling the journey is too long and hard for it to be worthwhile even beginning.

2. The way children learn is more similar than different.

There are people who believe children learn in very different ways and this means inclusive classrooms require different children doing different things.

This belief was at its peak when VAK learning styles were in vogue, and while these have been for the most part driven out of education the underpinning beliefs remain with us.

This is probably because the existence of a diversity of learning styles is a view now held by much of society, and the claim humans learn in very different ways is often repeated as fact even though there isn’t strong evidence it is true.

Such beliefs make it logical to believe some children can’t learn much in school if teachers do not match instruction to the different ways in which individual children learn.

It has even led some to argue schools are not capable of being inclusive because they are incompatible with the pluralistic ways in which children learn.

This view was (in)famously explained by the Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” video, which went further and argued the uniformity of schools destroys the innate creativity of children.

Those that believe this think teaching classes of children the same thing in the same way is inherently exclusive because being inclusive means different children doing different things.

Some may be working on coloured paper.

Some may be wearing headphones or using computers or tablets.

Some may be using fiddle toys while others sit on beanbags on the floor.

In classrooms like this the teacher will not be instructing the whole class – instead they use different methods with different pupils. Occasionally overstimulated children who need a break leave the room quietly to stand outside while the re-regulate before rejoining the class.

The room has a cheerful productive hum about it.

This is what teacher training twenty or so years ago held up as the ideal, and while this vision isn’t as often explicitly articulated it still has influence, particularly when inclusion is discussed.

SEND support built around conceptions of “additional/different” can imply inclusion must mean different things for different children and don’t sufficiently emphasise even when individualised strategies have value, they can’t be effective in contexts of disorder and confusion.

Another cause of confusion is how the assessment of individual needs of children is often done through processes detached from their context as members of classes.

Teachers aren’t private tutors, and don’t typically teach children one-on-one, which makes teaching strategies designed to work in this context of limited use to a typical mainstream teacher – what might be a helpful suggestion for an adult working with just one child can be terrible advice for a teacher teaching a class of twenty-nine.

When they try the result can be chaos.

Often it means confusion, unreasonable workloads and an inability to establish and set up the predictable and consistent routines and systems that allow lots of different people to be in one room working together.

This is not unique to teaching – any context in which there are lots of humans in one place – from battlefield armies to building sites to football grounds have common expectations, rules and modes of behaviour allowing individuals to work together towards a common aim, and this usually means doing many things in the same way.

It would be odd if classrooms in schools were the only exception to this; to be included children need agreed expectations of how to rub along together.

A reasonable response might be it isn’t the pluralistic teaching style vision itself that’s wrong, but that those who attempt to enact it aren’t doing it right – that teachers need to be better trained and resourced and if they were then more children would be included and it would be possible to create places in which lots of difference and adaptation become part of the culture.

The argument deserves to be taken seriously because any good idea can be ruined by poor resourcing and implementation. We must not be afraid of idealism because with pragmatism and good logistics this is the only thing that changes the world for the better.

In this case, however, it doesn’t fly because there isn’t enough good evidence children do learn in very different ways, which means solutions designed from this point beg the question by proceeding from a flawed premise.

Even if it were true there would be significant questions around scalability because we don’t have good examples of where such approaches have been successful, which means there aren’t good examples from which the system can learn. Finally, it’s worth noting that calls for the entire restructuring of the entire system and hugely increased funding to pay for it all aren’t serious – this would be a huge risk and secondly because without the resourcing to pay for it there is no path to effective implantation.

We should always be open to new and compelling evidence but in the meantime good intentions can’t excuse poor outcomes – visions of an ideal world can’t be a reason to do things we know won’t work in the world the children in our classrooms are taught in.

What then works better?

To understand we could look at the needs of children identified as having SEND, found on documents like pupil passports and Education Health Care Plans.

Here it is striking how typical strategies that are features of strong teaching for all children are emphasised; behaviour management techniques such as “have consistent, predictable routines”, and “responds well to praise”, and teaching strategies such as “break tasks down into smaller steps”, and “regularly check for understanding.”

Such strategies aren’t suggesting some children need radically different teaching to other children, but the problem is by identifying these as individual strategies for individual children there’s an implication these are things a teacher must do just for them rather than aspects of teaching practice that should be in place for everyone.

It is possible I’m overreaching, and I’m open to the possibility there may be some circumstances and conditions in which to be inclusive teaching must be extensively adapted but it is implausible most of the approximately 40% of children identified as having a SEND need at some point while at school have been assigned this label because they all learn differently to others.

And even where children have been identified with explicit and specific learning difficulties there is still little evidence this requires wholesale changes to instruction.

For example, for most children with dyslexia methods of reading instruction aren’t different to children who do not have dyslexia, and when instruction is adapted this is to make the common principles more precise and targeted.

Where adaptations are most obvious it is often not clear these are of benefit.

For example it is common for children experiencing difficulties in learning to be prescribed different coloured paper or lenses, despite there being  no conclusive evidence such practice outperforms the placebo effect. Worryingly, this is true of many separate specific strategies and interventions claiming to help vulnerable children, and evidence they do help is often limited to anecdotes on company websites and promotional leaflets.

This isn’t me nitpicking over minutia – it is important teachers know this because if there is no evidence something does what it claims to, then they shouldn’t expect any learning benefit from applying it. Conversely if someone insists something does work then a teacher should expect to see benefits. Whether something is likely to work or not is important for teachers to know because it will affect their planning and instruction.

There are few magic bullets.

The basic tenants of good teaching remain the same for just about everyone.

Where teaching is good it usually shares common principles. Even where it may appear to be quite different – for example someone teaching a person with a profound learning disability how to use cutlery, differences are usually superficial with the deeper structures – breaking things down into small steps and modelling – the same.

All this often means teachers often don’t need to target supposedly personalised strategies at only children specifically identified as needing such strategies – it’s easier, more logical and more beneficial for more children for the teacher to make sure these things are features of their regular teaching not add-ons for a select, special few.

Teachers seeking to make classrooms more inclusive should first focus on things that need to be in place for all children before attempting to make extensive individual level adaptation and differentiation. Those that do may find they are meeting the needs of many more children as a result.

When this is done well, inclusive classrooms do not look very different to good classrooms in general.

They are calm, quiet, orderly and clear.

Teachers explain things clearly in small steps and then tell children explicitly what to do. They pause to check kids have understood. They respond and adapt if they don’t. They have high expectations and maintain high standards, being predictable and consistent with routines, rules, rewards and sanctions so that more children are included in the group.

They speak to children with respect and ensure children treat them and their classmates with respect too.

Inclusive classrooms are places in which the teacher knows children in the room as individuals and targets the right question to the right pupil.

Inclusive classrooms are first good classrooms.

While this may not be sufficient, it is necessary, and no amount of bespoke, additional pedagogy can compensate for poor teaching.

Teachers must be careful attempt to meet individual need through individual adaptation don’t compromise the necessary base conditions so that nobody succeeds – it’s much harder to break things down into logical clear steps for everyone if a teacher is trying to do this for lots of different children in different ways because they think this is what is required of them.

So why do teachers feel they must do this, even when it’s against their better judgement?

Perhaps sometimes it happens because teachers lack confidence in their ability to create and maintain a calm and disruption free environment, or when leaders insist on seeing different things for lots of different children because they think this is what inclusion means. An example of this happening might be a SENDCo visiting lessons, observing only children identified as having SEND and then asking for more individual differentiation as a solution to a disorderly environment in which few children are able to learn, when the correct solution is at class and not individual level.

This does not mean all children find things equally easy.

More children are finding it harder to be included in mainstream classrooms and when discussing inclusive classrooms, the rise in the number of families seeking SEND identification and more individual support for their children needs to be acknowledged.

Those doing so are acting ethically and logically – as things stand there is no mechanism for parents to improve the overall quality of their child’s teaching, so if they are struggling seeking more bespoke support is their only option.

That said it seems unlikely we are seeing more struggling children because the nature of children in general has changed very quickly over the last few years.

More likely is in a context of rising poverty, increased time spent by children online, recruitment and retention issues, the collapse in children’s mental health services and declining real terms funding it is now harder for schools to create calm and positive classrooms for all, resulting in more kids struggling and being identified as having a SEND need.

This might mean better diagnosis or even overdiagnosis, but it is just as likely it means there are children with greater need who may have coped or even thrived before but are now not able to because we are experiencing the result of multi-system degradation.

These are difficult problems because many are not within the control of individual teachers.

While it is possible for teachers to be more inclusive when they focus on it, their efforts will be more impactful when school leadership supports them by creating conducive conditions to try – as hard as it is – to mitigate the effects of wider systemic failures.

All children benefit from consistency and predictability and if the learning and behavioural norms at a school aren’t clearly communicated and understood then associated confusion and disorder makes it hard for teachers to include children in their lessons.

Again, I think of my own daughter here.

When I think of her going to secondary school in a few years’ time I worry most about potential lack of clarity around things like how to behave at social times and on the corridor between lessons – if this is left to her to work out she’s more likely to make poorer choices and become dysregulated, which would make it harder for her to focus on her learning and harder for her teachers to include her.

This – again -is an example of how attending to getting the basics right for all children benefits those most likely to be marginalised most.

Answers will not be found in throwing more life belts to our drowning sailors – instead we need a better ship.

But there are dangers to what I’ve said so far -the most serious is a misinterpretation if the basics of schools are improved there would be nobody left requiring personalised support, and this isn’t true.

It is always possible to be more inclusive – the point of the continuum – and a calm, quiet, orderly, predictable, clear classroom can still be exclusive if a teacher allows children who find stuff harder than others to flounder.

3. Classrooms are compromises and more should be made in favour of those who would otherwise struggle most.

Designing any system that perfectly meet everyone’s needs is impossible because the interests and preferences of individuals are often opposed to each other. Trying to meet them all usually means nobody getting what they need.

The most able and knowledgeable children may prefer to learn independently but given how children are organised into classes allowing this for them means allowing it for all, and this has a negative effect on other children, and particularly those who find learning hardest who need the most direction and guidance.

While working in classrooms rather than individually at their own pace may disadvantage some advantaged children, in education most of the big compromises – those that matter most – are most often made in the interests of those who already find learning easiest.

A good example of this is the range of the primary curriculum and the size of the GCSE curriculum, which are too large.

A big curriculum is benefits those finding it easiest to learn because to cover all of it teachers must go too fast for those who struggle. At the end those finding learning easiest are those who gain top grades and access to more prestigious, high-status destinations. Those that find it hardest are least likely to see beauty or purpose in what they do and most likely to leave with qualifications of little practical use or value.

The purported purpose of SEND designation and – even more so EHCPs – is to balance this by requiring teachers and other education professionals pay more attention and afford more resource to these children than others. In many cases there needn’t be too much of a tension, and strong foundations make it easier for schools to identify and support the children who need help the most.

But while what works for all children usually benefits those with additional challenges most there will still always be children who require decisions to be made assertively in their favour even if this means others losing out.

Sometimes this is easy to see and straightforward to implement.

If a child with a hearing impairment needs to sit on the centre of the front row, then this need clearly outweighs the need of other children who might learn more if they sat there.

Similarly, if a visually impaired child requires a worksheet is blown up to A3 it would be unacceptable for the teacher to refuse to do it because it adds to their workload.

More difficult is – for example – what a teacher should do if almost all their class is ready to write an essay but some do not yet have sufficient mastery of the content to do it properly.

What should a teacher who wants to be more inclusive do in a situation like this?

Here teachers often – maybe usually – go with what they perceive the majority to be.

If most children are ready for the essay, then it’s time to write the essay and those that aren’t must muddle through as best they can.

Compromises like this may seem to be appropriately utilitarian in how they appear to be what’s best for the greater good, but they clearly favour the already advantaged most, which is uncomfortable because it is inherently inequitable.

This is a danger inherent in all societies and was written about well by John Stuart Mill – his arguments were latter summarised in the phrase “The Tyranny of the Majority”, which is what happens when what is best for most of a group is exclusively prioritised.

A more equitable compromise might be more pre work for those who aren’t ready even if this means some children must wait before beginning if the general conditions aren’t conducive to allowing some children to start while others receive more instruction.

Once children are working on their essays a more inclusive teacher would target individual support on the children experiencing most difficulty. This is equitable decision making because while the children finding the work easiest would also benefit from greater personal intervention, those struggling most lose out more if they don’t get help.

There’s nuance here too, and the concept of a continuum becomes important again.

Children aren’t either included or excluded in learning – they can be more or less included and including a child who grasps things easily more by, say, providing the class with more in-depth material or going at a pace that best suits them means those who struggle more are included less.

This might make them and their families happy, but it comes at a greater cost to those who struggle more, so it’s more equitable to make more decisions more in the interests of those who find learning harder especially when the system overall is slanted towards those who find it easiest.

This at scale would probably means trying to cover less.

This may seem radical but is not a fringe view – it’s one shared by Dylan Wiliam, emeritus professor at the UCL Institute of Education too.

None of this can be effective if strong general conditions aren’t embedded, and this is a mistake teachers can make through the best of intentions; if, for example, a class slides into talking and other off task behaviour when their teacher moves to individual support then this individual support won’t be effective and the result will probably be a-deterioration in general standards, which will affect those who struggle most making any individual support they receive ineffective.

Another helpful way of looking at this for classroom teachers is to first consider core principles of good instruction in general and then take steps to make sure every member of their class benefits from them, not just those who find learning comparatively easy.

Rosenshine’s Principles – adopted by many schools and teachers as a helpful heuristic for effective teaching – is a good place to begin.

Let’s explore just one – secure a high success rate.

This is easier to do for some children than others because of different starting points and differing learning abilities. Here a teacher who is being less inclusive might move on to new material after checking for understanding techniques show only some children have learned most of what they have just taught.

This is exclusive to children who have not achieved a high success rate because it means the teacher moving onto new material before they are ready. This means they can’t move onto the next stage – almost certainly in hierarchical subjects such as maths – and are excluded from the point at which they lost the thread. A teacher who is being more inclusive would spend more time responding and re-teaching so more children were able to secure a high success rate and be ready for the next stage.

And again, in this instance generally better teaching for all is likely to be inherently more inclusive because if – for example – explanations have been well sequenced and rehearsed to clarity then more children will achieve a high success rate meaning fewer requiring re-teaching and the teacher able to be more targeted and effective with those that do.

This is messy and complicated – and the only people able to decide what and how compromises should be made are classroom teachers as nobody else is close enough to the problem.

While it can be tempting for leaders and others to try and micromanage this, it doesn’t work.

4. Teachers should be in control of the decisions they make.

Children do not usually get a SEND identification in the same way unwell people receive a medical diagnosis.

They are assigned the label for many different reasons in many ways, and there are good reasons to be cautious about assuming there is shared meaning of the terms used.

There isn’t a standardised process or agreed criteria for adding a child to a school’s Special Educational Needs Register.

In many schools there is probably more process and procedure over buying a new laptop computer.

This is why there is such variance in the number of children identified as having SEND across different settings.

Indeed, the most significant predictor of whether a child is identified with SEND is the school they attend rather than anything about them.

We don’t know how much children identified as having SEND have in common with each other.

We don’t even really know who they are, and we don’t know whether they have enough in common to be grouped together at all.

Theoretically subdivisions such as “learning difficulty,” “cognition and learning”, and “social, emotional and mental health” should bring signal to the noise, but often they don’t because they too have no shared meaning; one setting might identify a child as having a cognition and learning difficulty, whereas another might not assess them has having a special educational need at all.

In practice a designation is made because a child isn’t attaining as highly as peers and nobody really knows why.

This makes it quite possible for a child to be identified as having special educational needs because they’re summer born, missed a lot of school or even because they’ve had limited access to good teaching.

Much of the information available isn’t secure enough for teachers to make decisions on without drawing on other evidence – most importantly what they notice about the learning of the child in their classroom. It means they can’t assume advice they are given on how to teach – say – children with cognition and learning difficulties is relevant to children in their classes because they can’t be certain the terms and criteria mean the same thing to everyone working with that child.

Similarly, while recommendations made by non-teaching professionals such as educational psychologists, counsellors and speech and language specialists can be useful, these recommendations are often not contextualised to the specific conditions in which a teacher encounters a child.

And this matters.

It’s striking how dissimilar the experiences of different teachers teaching the same child often are and the reasons for this can have little to do with how closely an individual plan is being followed.

This doesn’t mean teachers who want to be more inclusive should ignore information made available to them, but they should be allowed to be wise arbitrators of how best to use, interpret and apply advice, within legal frameworks meaning there are instances in which they must follow some directives for good reason.

The ability and capacity of teachers to do this varies, but nobody is capable of better decisions because nobody else is in the room with that child in that setting at that moment in time.

This is inevitable, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it even if they wanted to.

Ultimately, schools are set up for teachers to work with classes, and this means they must make minute-by minute decisions about how best to teach and include all pupils.

Micro-managing and imposing numerous and specific directions on them as to how to do this may be well-meaning but fails to account for the infinitive complexity within which teachers must work even if the way their pupils learn is mostly the same. It also invites in performativity; doing stuff not because it is really in the interests of children but to appease and satisfy other adults.

Where the evidence base is secure this might work but where it is not it doesn’t.

Better to empower and educate teachers to make better decisions than try and make decisions for them using incomplete and flawed information detached from the classrooms they work in.

5. Inclusion is the main business of classroom teachers.

Inclusion is primarily the business of classroom teachers.

Nobody can do it for them.

Attempts to try will fail.

“Inclusion” can’t be done by a SENDCO and Teaching Assistants alone – indeed this is a common concern and complaint of those who work with children identified with SEND who can often feel they are marginalised and siloed as if the education of a potentially hundreds of young people were only their responsibility.

There are just too many children who need great practice for a discrete specialised department or strategy to ever meet need.

Inclusion cannot be done by a strategy or policy document, or an IEP or a pupil passport or an EHCP.

Classrooms can only be made more inclusive by teachers, and they can only do this if they see the education of every child as their responsibility. They need practical support and help that makes it easier for them to fulfil this responsibility. This support must be clear and respectful of the contexts in which they work because when it isn’t it is too easy to think inclusion is too difficult and devolve responsibility for thinking about it to others. Support they get needs to start with the basics – leadership that makes schools calm, safe places in which there is room to think and decisions aren’t made in response to crisis.

Support should be dialogic and open to the possibility it might need to be changed and adapted when teachers find it isn’t helpful.

Inclusion – even when it is the first word of a completed sentence – is a verb not a noun, and teachers are the only people who can do it.

It must change as children and circumstances change. It must be worked on every minute. It is at the centre of good teaching, and teaching is not good if it is not inclusive.

It doesn’t need to feel mysterious or too hard to do, because most of it is about being a good teacher and seeing all pupils of equal value and having the same entitlement to learn. Seeing them as having more in common with each other than different.

I know to some this is a threat and must respect that, but to me it isn’t.

I don’t want either of my children to be thought of as special if this means being seen as fundamentally different to other children.

I want them to be seen as I and the people who know them best see them – perfectly normal, healthy human children requiring the things all children need to be happy and included in learning at school.

We are lucky, I know.

My children go to a school that understands this and sees inclusion in learning as a right both have – that respects the inherent humanity and value of all children.

This protects us from the SEND system which is failing everywhere.

It makes it matter less if documents are copy-paste terrible, the appointments cancelled, the advice inappropriate or even plain wrong – because the teachers are good teachers, and their values mean they include both my girls as much as it is reasonable to expect any child to be included in a system in which compromises must be made.

We are grateful.

My final point is – I hope – the logical culmination and expression of the previous four.

Inclusion is primarily the business of classroom teachers and nobody can do it for them.

While the superstructure around inclusion can obscure this it does not make it any less true.

“Inclusion” can’t be done by a SENDCO and Teaching Assistants alone – indeed this is a common concern and complaint of those who work with children identified with SEND who can often feel they are marginalised and siloed as if the education of a potentially hundreds of young people were only their responsibility.

There are just too many children who need great practice for a discrete specialised department or strategy to ever meet need.

Inclusion cannot be done by a strategy or policy document, or an IEP or a pupil passport or an EHCP.

Classrooms can only be made more inclusive by teachers, and they can only do this if they see the education of every child as their responsibility. They need practical support and help that makes it easier for them to fulfil this responsibility. This support must be clear and respectful of the contexts in which they work because when it isn’t it is too easy to think inclusion is too difficult and devolve responsibility for thinking about it to others. Support they get needs to start with the basics – leadership that makes schools calm, safe places in which there is room to think and decisions aren’t made in response to crisis.

Support should be dialogic and open to the possibility it might need to be changed and adapted when teachers find it isn’t helpful.

Inclusion – even when it is the first word of a completed sentence – is a verb not a noun, and teachers are the only people who can do it.

It must change as children and circumstances change. It must be worked on every minute. It is at the centre of good teaching, and teaching is not good if it is not inclusive.

It doesn’t need to feel mysterious or too hard to do, because most of it is about being a good teacher and seeing all pupils of equal value and having the same entitlement to learn. Seeing them as having more in common with each other than different.

I know to some this is a threat and must respect that, but to me it isn’t.

I don’t want either of my children to be thought of as special if this means being seen as fundamentally different to other children.

I want them to be seen as I and the people who know them best see them – perfectly normal, healthy human children requiring the things all children need to be happy and included in learning at school.

We are lucky, I know.

My children go to a school that understands this and sees inclusion in learning as a right both have – that respects the inherent humanity and value of all children.

This protects us.

It makes it matter less if documents are copy-paste terrible, the appointments cancelled, the advice inappropriate or even plain wrong – because the teachers are good teachers, and their values mean they include both my girls as much as it is reasonable to expect any child to be included in a system in which compromises must be made.

We are grateful.