The European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education held its second Biannual meeting of 2024 in Warsaw over two days in November. There was a slightly reflective mood throughout as this was the last Biannual to be led by the departing Director, Cor Meijer. His replacement was announced in September and was also in attendance.
Our first exercise of the conference involved reflections on the current Thematic Country Cluster Activities (TCCA). Our seminar had, as you’d expect, a lengthy title with an associated acronym: Monitoring and Evaluation Systems in Inclusive Education Policy (MESIEP). Alongside the representatives of Croatia, Malta and Ireland, we mapped out monitoring and evaluation systems in each country. We categorised these: national; regional; school-level; parent / carer and pupil. Then, we (physically, using notes, paper arrows and stickers…) charted the relationships between the different elements.
To give you an idea of the outcome, imagine a line running from the Education and Public Accounts Select Committees via DfE, encompassing the legislative framework (Equality Act and Children and Family Act and the associated SEND CoP) to local authorities. Another line runs between Ofsted and schools, bringing in parent/carers and pupils as well. Other actors included CQC, the Children’s Commissioner, and the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. These agencies are linked by data and activities such as inspections (our arrows).
A couple of interesting, comparable themes emerged across countries:
There seems to be a shared challenge in drawing on lessons from inspection frameworks, specifically between schools. So, when schools receive inspection reports, we asked how can these be effectively and meaningfully disseminated amongst relevant peer schools? It is also worth asking in the English context: are Local Area SEND Inspections and Ofsted school inspections working in concert to learn lessons and distil relevant data into action on inclusion?
Another shared feature was the importance of third sector actors in the field of monitoring and evaluation, and I’d add, accountability. The overall sentiment in the room was that third sector and independent organisations, play a vital role in shedding light on the detail of systemic challenges. While they do not typically play a formal role in the structures we set out, they have a significant influence on discourse, practice and policy.
Data generated by third sector and independent organisations in England is key to exposing the numbers behind some of the challenges we see in our schools and amongst our children and young people. Here are a couple of recent examples:
A report on lost learning, setting out in a nuanced fashion some of the undertheorized and unrecognised aspects of what is usually termed the crisis in school attendance. And from the Children’s Commissioner, this report laying bare the delays and inequalities facing children and young people with neurodevelopmental conditions.
These reports give substance to what children, young people, parent/carers and professionals intuitively know. And, crucially, they provide the hard data which is required to gain the attention of policy makers and inform their priorities.
There were of course differences between countries as well, the main one being that many other European countries are more centralised. When setting out the English monitoring and evaluation map, one more thing became visibly apparent: there is a gap between local authorities and schools and colleges. It is likely a result of the erosion of resources available at local authority level and the emergence of academies. There are some signs that policy might begin addressing some of these gaps in local oversight: the move to enforce the National Curriculum in academies (as set out in the Curriculum and Assessment Review); the proposed register of children out of school and obliging academies to co-operate with local authorities on admissions (the latter two in the proposed children’s wellbeing bill).
The TCCA work continued the following week with a Planned Learning Activity in Dublin, focusing on the role of inspectorates. While I wasn’t part of that exchange, Ireland shared their approach to inspection of inclusive practice in schools, including reflections on how they had changed the culture of the inspectorate to be more supportive and less adversarial. Key to lessons learned was that having the time to explain the context of a setting and respecting the practice that an inspector can share from having seen a huge range of schools leads to an enhanced sense of fairness.
We know that Ofsted are considering increased oversight of inclusion on the back of the Big Listen Report. Ofsted are also engaged in work to better understand and articulate the concept of vulnerability, commissioned to NCB. To my mind, this is an important step towards gaining a more nuanced, multi layered conceptualisation of who are we trying to include when we speak of inclusion?
The last session of the conference was led by the Polish Ministry of National Education and consisted of a set of seminars entitled ‘Implementation of high-quality inclusive education. Resources, working trends and progress towards outcomes. Opened by the Polish Minister of Education, the significance of the occasion was clear: the session was to feed into Poland’s upcoming presidency of the Council of the EU, where the Minister assured us, Inclusion will be on the agenda.
This was an international conversation considering ways to translate ethical intentions into policy and practice. Delegates were divided into groups and guided by questions set by the Polish Ministry. The seminar I attended was titled ‘Effective work in diverse groups’ and was focussed on the approaches and resources across Europe which support inclusive pedagogy.
It struck me, that in the conversation which followed, practically all speakers began by stating that the key resource needed for inclusion are teachers. And by that, they meant teachers who have not only been trained and hold the necessary skills for differentiation, but also feel they are able to be inclusive. This is a point that is both fundamental to the challenges we face in England (coupled, of course, with the woefully inadequate training in SEND) and under-recognised.
It relates to the concept of efficacy, written about a while back by a friend of the Education Team at CDC, Prof. Simon Gibbs: Teachers' perceptions of efficacy: Beliefs that may support inclusion or segregation. The crux of his argument, and I hope Simon will forgive the simplification, is that a sense of teacher self-efficacy is an important pillar of inclusive practice, and that in turn, this can (and must) be supported by a collective sense of efficacy amongst the school staff community.
The Portuguese representative shared information about the support schools in Portugal have in place. It is based on school clusters, each cluster and individual school having a multidisciplinary team which includes the assistant of the school director, one special education teacher, three members of the pedagogical council and the school psychologist. My Portuguese colleague wished to clarify: ‘we are focused on a whole school approach, that is, all members of the school community (school leaders, teaching and non-teaching staff, learners, parents and families) are responsible and play an active role in promoting inclusion and in helping students to reach their maximum potential’. As for the special education teachers, they are teachers who have chosen to take a post-graduation course, master’s degree or PhD in special education. This is the latest OECD report on Portugal’s journey towards inclusion (there are of course difficulties, for example allocating these specialist roles when there is pressure because of recruitment and retention challenges).
We know the new(ish) Government has indicated that increasing inclusion in mainstream is the direction of travel; might we consider such a set-up here as well to support this approach?
We were all treated to a cultural evening out visiting the Royal Castle in Warsaw, where we had a tour of the building, which was reconstructed in the 1970s after being largely ruined during WWII. This was followed by a moving recital from the renowned pianist Pawel Kowalski, and a fit-for-royalty dinner. The photo below shows Agency representatives in the grandeur of the castle. Dziękuję, Poland!
