The Department for Education appointed an expert group to review courses that lead to qualified teacher status, with the aim of providing high-quality training to teachers, and has sought responses to its recommendations.
In its response(with link to PDF of response please), CSIE welcomed the single acknowledgement that teachers must be adequately prepared to teach pupils with labels of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). At the same time, CSIE’s response stressed that the omission of any reference to this from the rest of the document makes it unlikely that teachers will be sufficiently prepared to respond to the full diversity of learners. If every teacher is a teacher of SEND, as the government has suggested and as they should be, then ITT must ensure that they can be.
In the current landscape, the education of children with labels of SEND is largely seen as the domain of specialists. This can give rise to the assumption that if one does not have such a specialism they are ill-equipped to respond to these children’s needs. In the process of developing a system where “every teacher is a teacher of SEND”, it is essential to prepare all teachers to work in inclusive classrooms, and equally important to provide sufficient professional development for those who support newly qualified teachers.
CSIE drew attention to the fact that the government’s annual survey of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) regularly finds that only about half of NQTs report that their ITT equipped them well to teach pupils with labels of SEND.
Current data suggests that fewer and fewer children are benefitting from the core high quality provision in our education system, as more and more children are segregated in separate special schools and alternative provision. CSIE’s response suggested that, in the 21st century, this needs to change. Education needs to better reflect the level of disability equality achieved in other parts of life.
The principal of Universal Design was put forward as an alternative basis for initial teacher education, with issues of SEND woven into its fabric instead of being bolted-on as an afterthought. This would contribute to the much-needed culture change in which disabled children’s right to an inclusive education is fully understood and respected in all schools. This, after all, is what the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities have repeatedly recommended to the UK as a matter of urgency.
CSIE’s response also suggests that the consultation may have been ill-timed, given that the summer holidays are not the best time to engage all key stakeholders in a meaningful way.
Finally, the response queries the need for such a radical transformation of ITT at all, given the apparent absence of evidence upon which this review was commissioned, or upon which its recommendations are based.
