If you teach, was your SEN training good enough?

[Whatafustercluck]

Inspired by a post from Bridget Phillipson about Labour investing in almost 3,000 more teachers. Many on that Facebook post highlighting SEN training as inadequate, so I'm curious about views from teachers.

My own experience (as a parent, not a teacher) has been very mixed. A senco who based her understanding of neurodivergence only on the traditional, mostly male presentation of autism and who therefore believed my then 6yo dd was 'fine at school'. A brilliant Y2 teacher (who had a partner with ADHD) who took the time to understand every child and knew how to get the best out of each of them - ND or not. A brilliant Y3 teacher, who has herself got one adult child with ADHD and a younger daughter with autism who just 'gets it'. A secondary school, in which some teachers excel in understanding ADHD and applying appropriate support and management strategies, and some that still appear to question whether it's even real, let alone try to understand/ support (despite a formal diagnosis).

EHCP applications have increased and that this is unsustainable. But my theory is that if SEN training for teachers was prioritised and was comprehensive enough, this may help stem the flow of EHCP applications from parents who currently feel unheard and unsupported. Many SEN children could thrive in mainstream, with very minor adjustments that inconvenience nobody, and attendance would also improve as a result.

I'm not a teacher, but I really value education and appreciate the two or three really excellent teachers who have supported my children to do well in mainstream schools. But it strikes me that those teachers, without exception, have personal lived experience of neurodivergence that only those dealing with it every day, as a parent or family member, really understand. The only thing I can think of that may improve this situation is improved SEN training for all teachers, yet I've heard from several teachers that they've had perhaps one day which has focused solely on autism.

No it wasn’t … but even the lecturers/ professors admitted it’s impossible to teach teachers to be prepared for every additional . There are just so many students and needs. Also if little Johnny is ASD he may be sensory seeking while little Booby is ASD maybe sensory avoidant so it’s so difficult. Adding in that we also have to teach the curriculum to all the ex amount of students while showing them equal care and attention

Im not sure what the answer is but always asking teachers to spin more plates isn’t the answer

Agree with all the secondary posters here.
The large class sizes with wide ability ranges and about 1/4 having some sort of SEN requirement makes teaching virtually impossible at times.At the start of this year I had 1 class that needed 13 different colours for worksheets " for dyslexia".(NB All these students have standard white background colours on their mobile phones so color can't make that much difference to them!)as well as the 3 levels of content differentiation. This class also had a partially sighted student who required enlarged text that needed specialist input from me due to subject requirements and non standard text. This pupil also needed adaptations to practical equipment that no SEN staff member had the will or expertise to do so I had to do that to make the lesson inclusive.
And that's only 1 class out of a dozen!
I'm not convinced that many of the things I am asked to do actually work.
SLT told me that the rainbow paper array was a good way of making it look like you were doing your job making individual provision for parents/OFSTED to see. Nobody seems to care about effectiveness as long as it looks good to the casual observer.
(A bit like purple,red and green marking colours)
So going back to the original post. Teachers need training in effective techniques not the latest gimmicks. There needs to be more subject specific training. Class sizes need to be smaller. Subject setting on subject ability needs to be the norm to allow each student to reach their potential - this is not the same as putting all students with SEN in the bottom groups. I have had some very able students with quite severe SEN needs who have done well in my subject and were in top sets .
Earlier intervention at primary school should concentrate on identifying issues and teaching techniques to help students access the majority of lesson content with the same resources as the rest of the class such as using colored overlays if needed or engaging with the TA if they are lucky enough to have one.
Parents need to encourage resilience,practice the techniques suggested by the school and explain to your child that their SEN diagnosis identified their problems but is not in itself a solution. The key to improving and achieving potential is getting good at applying the techniques.

I think enlarged text for a partially sighted student is guaranteed to work better than text they can’t possibly read.

SEN training will make no difference if schools aren’t given the resources to be able to implement what they are taught, and that will be the biggest problem.

Completely agree.

What is actually being suggested here regarding dyslexia, as well?

Many LEAs no longer recognise or assess for dyslexia. The screening tools available are notoriously unreliable and an actual diagnosis is a lengthy and very expensive process done by specialists which schools cannot afford.

If every child has to be 'screened' by some inaccurate tool, then who will do it, who will pay for it, what will happen as a result from it? What is telling 1/3 or 1/6 or 1/10 of the class that an unreliable screening tool says they 'might' have dyslexia actually achieve?

The problems are:

• lack of resources (space, equipment etc)
• the fact that the "answer" expected by parents always seems to involve a much higher number of adults, so that children have 1 to 1/2 to 1 adult support or very small groups (this is simply too expensive at the scale currently getting EHCPs)
• classroom strategies that might help the 20% or so with SEN but at the expense of the other 80% so teachers will not be able to successfully implement them
• a desire to "level" attainment. This means no longer differentiating to provide more demanding work to more able kids. But then means in response the government try to impose an average across a cohort which is too challenging for most. Bring back differentiation and accept alternative outcomes.

Many LEAs no longer recognise or assess for dyslexia.
And yet a third of DC get extra time in exams. One in 3.

I don't teach anymore and did my PGCE in primary 20 years ago now, but we had an SEN day where we got to pick which seminars we went too. From memory I went to one on dyslexia and one on traveller children. I learnt more when I was in placement but nothing specialised.

I can only assume it's much better now.

Secondary teacher here. I'm autistic myself. You can train me as much as you like, but I teach over 350 kids every week and there are limits to what I can do to meet every child's needs. I rarely have a TA, maybe a couple of lessons out of the 22 I teach.

There needs to be a realistic conversation about where education stops and healthcare, including mental healthcare, begins. We're just asked to do too much.

No.

But.

I don’t think anyone can really ‘get it’ until they live it. I was seen as a really good teacher for autistic pupils. Once I had my own autistic child I could see the gulf between what I thought was good and what was actually good.

Our SENCO is a SEND parent herself (3x school aged kids all with EHCPs). She is phenomenal in terms of support, thinking outside the box, and just giving things a go with zero pressure and always with a fallback up her sleeve.

I agree with this. What is the point of parents knowing their child has a mild, moderate, or high risk of dyslexia when schools can’t provide assessment unless they have an in-house assessor with a current assessment practising certificate? The screeners are inaccurate.

A dyslexia diagnosis does not entitle a student to extra time in exams. That stopped years ago.

I am a secondary school science teacher.

My SEN training will never be good enough. There are simply too many variations of what could be classified as SEN for me to ever meet the precise needs of every single student in classes as big as 35.

Even in smaller classes where there are higher proportion of SEN children (usually bottom sets) the needs are too varied. How are we meant to fully help the mute child who is overstimulated by loud noise when they are in the same class as the Child with tourettes who has to release a loud tic every three minutes to self regulate.... or release something even grander in five minutes time.

It is the part of my job I despair over. I feel sorry for the children who need help that we cannot adequately provide, while also feel anger when presented by children who have issues exaggerated due to neglect. Thinking of the child who had handwriting issues.... mainly because they had never been presented with a pencil and paper outside of school. Stop him using a laptop and funnily enough, practice made perfect. (No, not saying this would solve every issue of that sort....)

It's a mess.

Of course enlarged text helps! Duh!
The point I was making is that some subjects eg chemistry have very fixed formats for things like formulae and equations which the people in the SEN dept who are supposed to prep the work don't always appreciate. So a person is paid to prep the partially sighted students materials lacks the skills to do so accurately, and the resource needs prepping again by the classroom teacher. Hence one of the reasons subject specific SEN training is needed

Mine was absolutely incredible and mind blowing. It was really really thorough and totally opened my eyes to the reality of living with SEND everyday.
however, since I’ve left teaching it seems to have turned to poo.
The SENDCO for my child’s school doesn’t even understand his needs to leave the class periodically to try and give him a brain break.
It’s now totally inadequate.

There are simply too many variations of what could be classified as SEN for me to ever meet the precise needs of every single student in classes as big as 35.

And there is only so much we can expect one teacher to be able to achieve with 30/35 pupils and no TA, budget or resources, whilst simultaneously subjecting them to ever-changing and hugely stressful inspection regimes, ridiculous inappropriate curriculum expectations, inadequate PPA and putting them on ' support' plans when they get too old (expensive).

I taught for twenty years in mainstream.

in that time I taught many children with complex needs including children who were (mostly not all at once but some children had multiple needs) blind, deaf, unable to mobilise outside a wheelchair, had encephalitis, Down’s syndrome, Turner’s syndrome, uncontrolled epilepsy, as well as autism, adhd, attachment disorder, anxiety.

these days adhd and autism are relatively common in classrooms, but how many people (never kind teachers) have heard of Turner’s syndrome?

you can’t teach them all. The system (such as it is) is that there are specialists who you call in to advise - so most local authorities have specialist teachers if the deaf and specialist teachers of the visually impaired for example.

we had whole school training for the deaf children but there’s a limit to what you can learn in a couple of hours.

there’s also the issue that certainly in my classes )I taught the nurture group) every single child had SEN and most were on EHCP plus where their needs were so complex they had additional funding to recognise the fact that they needed the support to access mainstream. This paid for (among other things) a TA to do intimate care (many were too physically disabled to toilet themselves), a TA to help them eat (ditto). With students like this autism is the icing on the cake and interacts with their other diagnoses in a sometimes unpredictable way.

I’m not a teacher, but I am the autistic parent of autistic children, and I was invited to join my dc’s school autism training sessions as the HT hoped it could give me some insight into autism to help my dc 🤔😬

It was terrible. Basic and full of misinformed generalisations that might help one or two children (being generous) if they were boys with stereotypical “little professor” presentation of autism. The woman leading it also led parent sessions for newly diagnosed children, I’d been to those sessions and they were cringeingly awful.

At this point I fully believe that more parents of autistic children should be more involved with schools and how they manage classrooms, from how they are decorated to layout, uniform, SN spaces etc.

The whole education crisis has been coming for the last 20 years, and the main people I know who’ve seen it coming have been those working closely with SN pupils - their parents or the specialist teachers whose knowledge goes well beyond the crappy training sessions. All the while teachers still working seem to do their best to defend the horrible and damaging system whilst simultaneously pointing out how stressed they are and how they want to leave.

It’s not really the training. It’s class sizes, lack of TAs, lack of time to adapt resources, not enough laptops. Also for some students, the strategies don’t work or they refuse adaptations because they are ‘embarrassing’ (secondary).

No it wasn't good enough.
But how do you quantify "good enough"?
TBH even with the on the job training etc. It will never be good enough because there is far too much going on in classrooms for it to be good enough.
From class sizes that are too big, pupil's ECHP's that contradict each other, even just the classification of what SEN in a classroom looks like/is.

It is never going to work unless the education system is revamped completely and we stop pretending that teachers can do everything.

I trained 15 years ago and we had hardly anything on SEN, I had a degree in psychology so was maybe a bit ahead of the curve but I now feel that’s out of date - current thinking in ADHD, autism, dyslexia etc is all very different to 20 years ago.

the problem with these tiny tweaks you think might help some children stay in mainstream OP, is that all the tiny tweaks add up and become impossible to manage. Eg 3 kids need their work photocopied on coloured paper, one needs to arrive in school 5 minutes early to avoid the cloakroom rush, one needs to leave lessons 2 minutes early because it eases their anxiety, one needs advance warning of fire drills, two need support organising their personal belongings, two need everything read to them during the lesson, another needs a laptop and another needs a scribe, one needs movement breaks every 15 minutes, one needs 25% extra time on every task (HOW - make the day longer?!), 3 need fidget toys, one has a hearing aid which needs connecting to the mic and testing each day….it all adds up and is completely overwhelming. These are all requests I’ve had made of me as a teacher over the years and individually to the parents and child of course it’s such a minor adjustment and seems perfectly doable. But when half your class have a pupil passport/IEP/whatever they’re called now (as I have had in the past) it’s completely unmanageable.

I voted yanbu. Not only are you not unreasonable, yours is one of the best posts I've ever read on Mumsnet.

I don't have the energy to elaborate, I'm neck deep in a battle with autistic dds school whilst working ft and solo parenting, but thankyou for saying this.

Can't vote, as I think YANBU about the fact that Initial Teacher Training is completely inadequate in terms of SEND training.

EHCP applications have increased and that this is unsustainable. But my theory is that if SEN training for teachers was prioritised and was comprehensive enough, this may help stem the flow of EHCP applications from parents who currently feel unheard and unsupported. Many SEN children could thrive in mainstream, with very minor adjustments that inconvenience nobody, and attendance would also improve as a result.

This however, is a nonsense. YABVU in thinking it is this simple.

The significance of need, and the numbers of children with complex, significant needs has exploded over the last 10 years. None of the dc I taught in special school in the 1990s and 2000s would even get an EHCP today, let alone a special school place. You are living in a completely different world from the Primary school teachers in my LA and what they are expected to be dealing with.

I had lots of training but as others have said it was often completely impossible to implement everything but I always did my best. In fact the senco at my last school was more of a hindersnce than a help. For example, one pupil who was very highly medicated for adhd, often completely unable to self regulate and prone to violent outbursts. I had managed to get a good relationship with this student and he was doing quite well until the senco told me he had to be seated at the back next to his friend, rather than at the front next to a girl who she had originally asked me to sit him with. Within one or two lessons he became completely unmanageable because he felt that he could do whatever he liked as the senco would back him up! Honestly parents have no clue how hard it is to manage these things in a large school setting. It isn’t a case of teachers not understanding issues, it is a case of it simply being unrealistic to manage the multitude and exponential needs we apparently now have. Especially if we dont maintain high standards even for pupils with complex needs (obviously within reason).

I think we need to look a lot harder at the causes of the explosion in send.