We’re All Teachers Of Special Needs

The SEN Code of Practise makes is clear that it is teachers, not TAs, who are responsible for the education of every single child, says Nancy Gedge...

When Sam started school I wasn’t particularly phased by the event. He was entering my world, that of the mainstream primary, and I was excited. Having spent the first four-and-a-half years working with a variety of professionals – from physios, through speech therapists to Portage workers – he was leaving the auspices of the Department of Health (well, as much as any child with Down Syndrome ever leaves), and joining the ranks of school boys and girls for whom the Department of Education (in its many guises) was responsible.

One of the things that threw me when he was born and diagnosed with a chromosomal abnormality was the language employed by medical professionals; it was, to my ears, cold, clinical, full of incomprehensible jargon. I can understand how parents of children with SEN, parents who don’t have my insights as a teacher, must feel in schools – as if they are blindly navigating a swamp of acronyms, a linguistic barrier that keeps them at an unintended distance. And this separation is one of the very things the new SEN Code of Practice is designed to counteract.

Children and their parents are placed right at the centre of the new law. One of the things I understood, with all the clarity of the convert, when my son arrived with a little bit extra, was that I was now the expert in the room. I might not have a medical degree, but I was the one who was up in the night, listening to breathing, checking temperatures. I was the one who found creative ways to get him moving, to get those muscles working. I was the one who was interested enough, who believed enough to do the research and I wanted to share it with his teachers. I didn’t want to be always talking to the TA at the end of the day. Sam had a helper with him all the time he was in school, so it was inevitable this person would be writ large in all our lives. But they were not, I thought, the ones in change of his education.

Now, a couple of years along from his entry into the special school system, I come across report after report that warns against learned helplessness – the constant working of children with the greatest need with those without the greatest skill or qualification, the difference in the educational experience of included children, or any with a label of SEN – and I wonder at the uncanny similarity to our experience.

The new Code of Practice sets out as clear as crystal that this situation is no longer to be borne. The buck stops with the class teacher. It is stated there, in black and white, if not in bold print, that the class teacher is the teacher of every single child in the class. Not just the bright ones or the good ones, the naughty ones or the nice ones. All of them. Even the ones with capable TAs. We teachers need to get to know those children too. Every single teacher is a teacher of special needs. No one can hand a child over to a TA, or another teacher, or the SENCo and say, “I don’t teach them that. I don’t know where they are at”.

I do understand how it is. When Sam exploded into my life, his learning difficulty unannounced, I was scared. I worried I wasn’t up to the job, that the responsibility would be too much. I didn’t know what I was doing with an ordinary baby, let alone an extra special one. But here’s the thing: I found out what I needed to know along the way. If I made a mistake, we started again, tried a different tack. If I got stuck there was always someone to ask – grandmas, other young mums, anyone who was prepared to listen, in fact.

And although the new SEN Code of Practice will be throwing us in at the deep end, and not only that, but the waters are already choppy what with Free Infant School Meals, a new National Curriculum, the abolition of levels and PRP, in a school, there is always someone to ask. The LAs have been busy writing their local offers, a data base of the specialist provision available in their area, but before you get there, there is the previous teacher, TAs, dinner ladies, parents even; all these people are mines of information. You never know until you ask.

About the author

Nancy Gedge is a primary teacher in Gloucestershire. She blogs at notsoordinarydiary.wordpress.com