Like so many other meetings, the bi-annual meetings of the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education have been held virtually for the last couple of years. In fact, the first meeting in the pandemic was cancelled. It had been planned for what turned out to be the period when everyone was frantically moving everything online, getting to grips with the technology, changing face-to-face training materials into online versions, getting used to the domestic backdrops on Teams and Zoom and, for presenters especially, learning to live with the challenges of interruptions by children and domestic pets.
With the Athens meeting being the first face-to-face meeting for two and a half years, there was a real buzz of excitement. This was an opportunity to catch up with the projects run by the Agency, but also the opportunity to hear about developments in different nations across Europe, which we always talk about in the margins of the main meetings. The excitement this time was amplified by celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the European Agency. This included cake: a big one.
There is always a European Agency project that is just being scoped or getting under way, others for which we receive updates and, almost always, a final report on a project that is just concluding. A key focus of the meeting in Athens was on the final stage of the project on Changing Role of Specialist Provision in Supporting Inclusive Provision, with the catchy acronym of CROSP.
The project had started with a mapping exercise based on past, current and forecast trends in the support that specialist provision makes to mainstream schools in the 26 Agency member countries that took part. The mapping was followed by two rounds of workshops, focusing on the four main themes that had emerged from the earlier activities: governance, funding, capacity building and quality assurance.
The workshops were based on a peer-learning approach and helped representatives to reflect on their own systems and on each other’s. With a focus on effective improvement strategies, representatives worked with each other on mapping where they were on the journey, identifying next steps and planning ways of developing quality in the role of specialist provision supporting inclusive education.
Through this process a CROSP Review Tool was developed and we all had sight of the final draft before the meeting in Athens. If it all sounds a bit high level so far, when you look at the actions set out in the tool it gets down to the day-to-day detail of, for example, decisions about identification and personalised provision.
Thinking about the role of special schools in supporting inclusive provision always presents a bit of a challenge for me as I remember one Ofsted report concluding that effective partnership work between mainstream and special schools on curriculum and teaching is the exception rather than the rule. Another Ofsted report found that work to promote links between special and mainstream schools, specifically to provide SEN and disability expertise to mainstream schools, led, in the end, to more pupils being placed in special schools rather than improvements in inclusive provision in mainstream.
Browsing through the Review Tool gave me pause for thought: it is very strong on the articulation of a shared set of values to underpin the work across mainstream and special schools. The tool opens with a set of 6 principles, these inform the policy priorities and the strategies that are picked up in the self-review tool; the policy priorities and the strategies are, in turn, seen as fundamental to meeting the values expressed in the guiding principles. There is therefore complete linkage between the values and actions taken to realise them.
The first principle is about developing a shared commitment to inclusive education; and the first policy priority under this principle:
1.1: There is a shared commitment to inclusive education supported by a political will to encourage long-term change
Then, sitting under this policy priority, there are actions that might be judged to be evidence of this as a priority or, if the actions are not yet in place, important to making a reality of this priority. In this Review Tool, there is real coherence between the principles, the priorities and the actions to achieve these.
This made me reflect on the extent of the references to inclusion and inclusive schools in the Green Paper. Might we use the period following the consultation on the Green Paper, to consider whether and, if so, how these references fit into a framework of values? And whether, collectively, as a nation, we share that ambition for inclusive education? Since many of our indicators point to the opposite in terms of current direction of travel.
If we do share that ambition, the test for the proposals in the Green Paper is whether they help us towards realising it; and what else we might need to do, beyond the Green Paper proposals, to realise this ambition. The CROSP Review Tool takes us into leadership, funding systems, initial training and continuing professional development and other areas we would need to visit to test that coherence between ambition and practical proposals.
It’s food for thought.
Talking of food for thought, I said the cake to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Agency was big. It was but, in case there wasn’t enough to go round, everyone was given an individual one too. It was tiny, but incredibly sweet!
Wish you were here!
Philippa
