The "holy grail"...

I am very fortunate at the moment to be involved in all kinds of work related to inclusion in education: from teaching a couple of days a week in mainstream, to pro-bono work on the Finding Common Ground work, to setting up a charity to provide AP for students with EBSNA and support for parents who are reluctantly home-educating, to providing school training on trauma informed practice, to helping to introduce flexi-schooling .... amongst other interesting things. One element of my work that I really enjoy is visiting schools to review their whole-school inclusion strategies - it gives me a real insight into some of the best practice available. I have had the great good fortune to visit some exceptional schools recently, the kind that give you hope for the future of our educational system.

I am not going to name them, that would be unfair (and possibly break my contractual arrangements!), but I have been visiting mainstream schools with high numbers of students with SEND who are not overwhelmed, who value and support these students, where they are indivisible from other students in school - in short, where inclusion is working. I fully accept that there are some students for whom specialist provision is absolutely the right place, but my whole career has been focused on making provision for as many children as possible in mainstream - I am a community-school practitioner at heart.

So what is the "holy grail"? What is it that these schools are doing? It seems very clear to me:

1. Very high standards of universal provision. What is nowadays known as "quality first teaching" (which always seems an odd phrase to me!). In short, if teaching and learning are "red hot" with high expectations of all learners, then many students with SEND will be appropriately catered for.

2. Very high standards of "behaviour" based on exceptional relationships and a thorough understanding of trauma-informed practice and individual knowledge of each child's circumstances leading to exceptional pastoral support

3. Comprehensive and targeted early intervention based on need for those identified as not making appropriate progress in any way (be that SEMH, literacy, social anxiety or any other need)

I see some schools focused on the first of these who don't provide appropriate support or intervention and therefore use behaviour sanctions to "remove" those who can't conform in lessons. This leads to exclusion from learning. I see some schools so focused on intervention and support that the standards in the classroom are not high enough. When the balance between all three is right then children can fly!

This is how we can cope, and even thrive, with the significant increase in SEND. As a school I visited recently said "sometimes we don't notice students with SEND" - not because they didn't want to, but because the universal provision was so good that students with SEND thrived alongside their peers.

The question is actually how do we "bottle" and transfer this practice? Developing this balanced culture takes hard work and intelligence (emotional as well as academic). If the government wants to address the SEND crisis through improved mainstream schools it needs to find an effective mechanism in our fragmented and Ofsted-obsessed system to "enforce" outstandingly inclusive practice. Are all the levers and drivers that control school's behaviours focused on improving inclusion (measured by low behaviour issues, high student engagement, outstanding results and high parent/carer satisfaction).

There is hope, but such provision needs to be available to everyone!

James Harris

james@findingcommonground.org.uk