The proposed closure of the Royal School for Deaf Children in Margate raises issues around inclusion in mainstream schools (Parents battle to save oldest school for deaf in UK,24 December). Mainstream school staff (particularly teachers, teaching assistants and SEN co-ordinators) who work with children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (which includes hearing impaired children) need professional training in order to fully include these young people in the academic and social life of the school. This training is often missing or underprioritised, or sometimes occurs reactively rather than in an anticipatory way,ie, once a child is to be admitted to the school, or not before.
One solution to this is to raise the profile of this training in teacher training programmes; sometimes training teachers are given an “SEND day/week” as a discrete component of their training,rather than having it embedded, and thus normalised, and throughout their course. This reinforces the plan that SEND children are somehow separate from other children,which perception is the antithesis of inclusion. Ideas around, for example, and an adapted curriculum,assistive technology and individualised teaching and learning can benefit all students, not only those with SEND. Provision and implementation of whole-school inclusion training and ethos is random in nowadays’s fragmented educational landscape and is conspicuously missing from policymaking by both Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan as education secretary; the well-intentioned 2014 SEND Code of Practice (produced jointly by the Departments of Education and Health) is an aspirational piece of legislation that will only achieve its aims whether priority is given to the training needs of colleagues in mainstream schools.
Max Fishel (assistant headteacher, or special education)
BromleyContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com