Worlds apart? How pupils with statements lead a life away from the class: Findings from the Making a Statement project

Abstract

IN FEBRUARY, the coalition government’s long-awaited Children and Families Bill began its passage to Royal Assent. Its first reading in Parliament set out how services relating to adoption, looked-after children and those with special education needs (SEN) will change under the proposed legislation. Following the Lamb Inquiry into parental confidence in the SEN statementing system, and several reviews into provision for types of SEN (e.g. The Salt Review on severe, profound and multiple learning difficulties, and John Bercow’s review of speech, language and communication needs), the coalition have drafted proposals that will bring about the biggest changes in SEN in 30 years. One of the most significant moves will be to replace statements awarded to pupils with the highest level of SEN with Education and Health Care Plans (EHCPs). EHCPs, like the current statements, set out a pupil’s educational needs and the provision that he or she should receive to meet them. However, little is known about the day-to-day teaching and support that pupils experience once a statement is put in place. So, with such seismic change on the cards, we might ask if the call for reform is premature. Last year, we conducted the Making a Statement (MaSt) project to find out more about the teaching, support and interactions experienced by pupils with statements attending mainstream primary schools. We shadowed 48 pupils in Year 5 who had statements for moderate learning difficulties or behavioural, emotional and social difficulties, making minute-by-minute observations. We followed each pupil for a full school week. Observations of 151 average attaining ‘control’ pupils were also collected to provide a reference point for comparison. We also produced detailed case studies on each of the statemented pupils, based largely on interviews with 195 teachers, teaching assistants (TAs), SENCos and parents/carers. Spending a week at a time carrying out observation and having discussions with practitioners and parents/carers, demonstrated that schools are making every effort to attend to the needs of pupils with statements amid a period of intense flux and uncertainty for schools and local authorities. However, quantitative and qualitative analyses of these data identified some overarching concerns that capture the MaSt study’s key results. These results, which we describe below, will be of interest to both policymakers and professionals working with pupils with SEN in schools and local authorities. Firstly, we found that a high degree of separation and TA support are strong and consistent characteristics of the educational experiences of pupils with statements. The pupils spent over a quarter of their time away from the mainstream class, the teacher and their peers. A clear point to emerge was the almost constant accompanying presence of a TA in relation to all the locations in which pupils worked. There is, in other words, an intimate connection between TAs and the locations, both in and away from the classroom,