Research School Network: The tools in a teacher’s armoury The third in this blog series on SEND examines the importance of CPD in ensuring that all teaching is high quality

The gauntlet was thrown down in the last blog to consider pupil groupings very carefully, seeing as the evidence points to a negative impact on the outcomes and attainment of our SEND pupils. With this in mind, we need to then consider how teachers meet the challenge of mixed ability classrooms, if that is where the rationale for our school context leads us.

The third recommendation in the SEND guidance report says

It should go without saying that effective teaching and learning is priority number 1 in any school improvement plan and should be our bread and butter, but it requires a rigorous approach to teacher professional development to ensure that this is core and embedded into school.

The literature review conducted prior to the writing of the guidance report found that effective teaching for pupils with SEND ​‘require nothing that is outside of a trained teacher’s competence.’ These include strategies and aspects such as:

• positive interaction between the pupil and teacher;
• teaching more structured steps towards an end goal, possibly through additional teaching;
• graphic organisers, mnemonics, learning scaffolds;
• additional interventions – possibly to support skills such as fluency in reading.

Important to note here that these are not all things which can happen logistically in a mainstream mixed ability classroom. However, by building your staff knowledge and skill base with a variety of strategies and techniques, the more likely that increased numbers of pupils can follow along with the teaching being offered to them.

The guidance report offers 5 strategies with strong evidence behind them for their effectiveness in supporting pupils with SEND:

• flexible grouping – the idea of using temporary groups, formed to address a particular need;
• cognitive and metacognitive strategies, with the worked example of graphic organisers – see EEF guidance report on Metacognition for more;
• explicit instruction – most popular exemplification is Rosenshine’s principles of instruction;
• using technology to support pupils with SEND, specifically the use of apps to instruct and support – see also EEF guidance report on using digital technology ;
• scaffolding, although care must be taken not to create dependence on such a tool.

Within the lists above, there is a lot which can be unpacked and further exemplified, but let’s try to simplify.

Every teacher is a teacher of SEN.

We’ve all heard this adage and can’t help but agree with it. But what are we agreeing to? I would suggest something like this: good teaching is good teaching for all pupils, no matter their prior attainment.

Therefore, there is no magic bullet which we should be chasing. It is within the hard work of doing things consistently well and rigorously that ​‘magic’ is to be found.

Let’s explore how to effectively implement a school-wide teaching strategy of scaffolding, by considering these questions:

• Does your CPD explicitly ensure that all staff know strategies to scaffold appropriately in their classrooms? 
• Is good practice shared within the school and potentially across schools to enable this to be at optimal level? 
• Are there checks or quality assurances which take place so that you know all teachers understand how to use the strategy and are employing it well?

The answers to the above questions could look like this:

• whole staff inset which explores the evidence behind scaffolds giving some particular examples of these in use; 
• small group staff inset where scaffolds are role-played or share within the group (potentially in departments to enable expertise to come to the fore); 
• strategically selected staff visit other schools with reputations for good scaffolding to see what it looks like in their context; 
• learning walks happen regularly, but these have a specific focus and each member of staff knows what they’re meant to be working on and has feedback; SLT meet to discuss the outcomes of the quality assurance and make adjustments to staff CPD; 
• adjustments get fed back into the whole staff CPD; and the cycle continues.

A visual simplification:

Whilst it may seem that there’s a big leap here from teacher’s tools and strategies to employ to meet the challenge of mixed ability groupings, through to the consideration of the school CPD program, but this is needed to ensure effective implementation and all pupil access to high quality teaching.

I am uncertain how else you can meet the challenge of ensuring that all pupils can access high quality teaching if you haven’t been explicit with your staff what that looks like.

For those of us who learnt to teach over 15 years ago, it is highly likely that the youngsters in our profession have more up to date knowledge of strategies like those in Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion.

Teachers, new and old, need to be given the tools to use. To adapt an earlier point, it is within the hard work of SLT leading on specific aspects of teaching consistently well, with quality assurance and rigour, that ​‘magic’ is to be found in the classroom.