Meeting with Ministers: your questions

[Inappropriatelyemployed]

I have been invited to a meeting with ministers in relation to SEN matters and I am keen to share your questions with them.

Additionally, I am involved in a proposal for research on the Equality Act and SEN law which will touch on the Children and Families Bill. It will involve as much investigation with families as we can manage so please do let me know if you have areas which you feel strongly about.

ok so fat fingers and phones don't mix and ds messed up my computer keyboard and just spent half hour taking spacebar apart not entirely successfully

just trying to say having at least some children getting gold standard provision via tribunal is important. Otherwise all provision would be watered down and be no examples of what is possible out there. I am pretty sure most of the autism professionals in my LA do not even know what good provision looks like. If we lost those good examples everyone would suffer.

Just the idea of being taken to tribunal acts as a bit of a brake - without it LAs would not use money saved to raise standards, it would be a race to the bottom

IA, I agree with you about ABA. As it's currently marketed, commercially available provision is often an expert-heavy, somewhat dogmatic, largely 1-1 discipline specialising in rigid programmes for (mainly) young children with autism. What it should be is the universal availability of a far more 'scientific' mentality. Where aims are thought-out, targets are SMART, and staff giving extra help all consider and evaluate whether their strategies have worked, after every input.

A universally disseminated set of effective teaching skills: association (pairing), systematic reinforcement, shaping, chaining etc. Where all 'difficult behaviours' are looked at to establish the underlying cause, the environment is adjusted if necessary, and the consequences are carefully considered and planned.

Lots of people call this 'good teaching'; it's not new, it's not special, but it's sadly rare

evidence based education

Surgical training for US army docs

What Mareeya said.

ABA is supposed to be about practicing, measuring the effectiveness, garnering feedback from the student and refining to ensure efficient and cooperative progress. I know it isn't anything like that as it is currently practiced in many instances which makes me extremely angry at times, but you can't throw out the approach because of bad practice.

I think you have misunderstood the food thing. No-one is making any money out of presenting foods. A Masters student worked with just 4 families for whom food acceptance was a significant problem and wrote up her findings. No-one has sold this as an approach and the families were carefully chosen to be those for whom food acceptance was affecting their lives to a detrimental degree. It was just a study. It was and impressive and surprising outcome which is why it was brought up on here.

And to defend Headsprout, it is as dull or otherwise as a pencil. How it is used is what is significant.

Mareeya articulated my philosophy wonderfully.

It comes back to that old wives saying "there's nought so rare as common sense!".

Having spent years in commercial industry working on all sorts of projects I still find it very hard to understand the cultural resistance to SMART targets within education for example. I'm overjoyed that the concept of measurable outcomes is finally entering the cultural arena of SN education. "Loving the child" is not enough if he's likely to grow into a 6 foot 5 hulk that insists on masturbating on public transport - we have to TEACH him effectively too!