The Salt Review published its final report and submitted it on 25 February to the Secretary of State. The Review was commissioned as one of several measures aimed at providing better support for disabled children and/or those said to have special educational needs.
The Salt Review specifically focused on the decline in supply and training of what it refers to as “specialist” teachers, for children identified as having “severe” or “profound and multiple” learning difficulties. It notes “the very positive policy to promote inclusion” in recent years, but notes that specialist training was accordingly removed from Initial Teacher Education and offered instead through continuing professional development. This was done on the expectation that any teacher may have to teach a child or young person with high level support needs (those the report identifies as having “severe” or “profound” learning difficulties). The Review calls this “a gap left in the system,” and places much emphasis on providing the “distinctive pedagogical approaches” needed to fill it.
Some of the report’s recommendations are encouraging. It acknowledges that some children and young people – nearly a quarter of the population it looked at – are in mainstream, and anticipates that this percentage will increase. It appropriately suggests that some ordinary schools feel unable to provide for young people with high level support needs, thus evading the common deception that some children’s needs are so “profound” that they cannot be included in mainstream. Finally, the report makes training recommendations that are specifically for mainstream schools: local authority provision of “bespoke induction” for mainstream teachers; clarification of the routes by which teaching assistants can qualify as teachers; and the funding of special schools as leaders to train mainstream schools in how to deliver support (though it does not address the problem of how this can be achieved by a sector whose own resources are stated to be in a weak condition).
Most of the report’s recommendations concern the segregated sector. In particular it notes the absence of younger teachers here: 45% of special school staff are aged over 50, but only 27% of mainstream staff. While stopping short of asking for the reintroduction of “specialist” routes in initial teacher education, it seeks to remove certain “myths”: that initial teacher education cannot take place in a special school, or that newly qualified teachers have to complete their first year in a mainstream school. What effect this will have remains to be seen. An alternative interpretation of the above evidence might be that younger teachers have themselves grown up in a more inclusive society and do not want to work in places where children visibly lack the company of brothers, sisters, friends or potential friends from the local community.
One question remains: training and expertise for what purpose? What is it that we want to achieve? When disabled young people and/or their parents are asked what they want to gain from education, they rarely fix their gaze on conventional attainment targets, which may even be irrelevant to them; instead, they often focus on social relationships of their own and a place in the wider community. If that is the case, then the kind of expertise needed surely lies more in the area of person-centred planning than of traditionally conceived lessons. In fact the basic pedagogic principles are the same for educating all children. It is not so much skills or training that are needed: above all it is a willingness to find ways to include all young people in ordinary local schools, the support to do so and the confidence that comes from this experience. No matter what professional development opportunities are available, unless ordinary local schools become more willing to make space for everyone, teachers will not be able to build up the confidence that the report suggests they lack.
