ON a recent damp Monday morning, the JEP met Plat Douet headteacher Phil Walker at his school to talk about children with Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities.
It is a subject that hit the headlines in October, when an independent analysis of the quality of inclusive education for pupils in government-funded schools with SEND was published.
A team of four people visited 20 schools and spoke to Education Minister Rob Ward, senior civil servants from the Children, Young People., Education and Skills Department, SEND advisers and other professionals. It also spoke with pupils, parents and reviewed a large number of policies, documents and plans between January and June.
The ‘Island SEND Review’ it produced at the end was compressed to just seven pages, but its brevity did not diminish its impact.
Mr Walker has been seconded to CYPES on a part-time basis to help implement its recommendations, with three other senior leaders.
The report identified “positive intentions” and “pockets of good practice” but added that “strategic planning, leadership, system cohesion and the implementation of inclusive education remain underdeveloped and inconsistent.”
The findings were condensed to 31 bullet points and its recommendations to 16, most of them proposing widespread, systemic change.
One of them, for example, proposed: “Leaders should ensure that all schools understand what is expected in terms of meeting pupil’s SEND needs on a day-to-day basis. Training must be provided to facilitate this.”
In summary, the review found: “Overall, the current leadership, organisation, systems, strategies, oversight and accountability arrangements, in relation to inclusive education in Jersey are not sufficiently effective.
“Consequently, there is too great an inconsistency in the experiences and outcomes for Jersey’s children and young people with SEND.”
The review recommended that “immediate priority” is given to make sure:
• the centre, schools and wider stakeholders work together to develop, share and publish their immediate priorities together with medium-term and longer-term strategic plans containing targets, timescales, milestones and success criteria;
• systems for governance and accountability are clarified, and;
• an ongoing programme of internal and external monitoring is devised.
The review also concluded that the recommendations of an earlier report by the National Association for Special Educational Needs, published in 2021, had “not yet been responded to effectively”.
Before his JEP interview, Mr Walker showed this correspondent around the colourful corridors and classrooms of the St Saviour primary school. It was dynamic and busy, but the children were polite and calm.
In the Additional Resource Provision areas, children with a variety of different needs were learning, often at their own pace but always under the watchful tutelage of staff.
Reflecting on the SEND Review – which was described as “heartbreaking” by some parents who said they felt “vindicated” by its publication after years of campaigning – Mr Walker stressed that it was a critique of CYPES and not individual schools.
He said: “I definitely don’t put any fault at the foot of schools; I think they have done an amazing job and since my secondment, I’ve been visiting schools to see what they are doing.
“Despite the lack of strategic planning from the department, schools are in a good place, but we can be even better. We need strong leadership right now and a clear direction.
“But more than anything, we need to be open, honest and transparent. We need to tell people what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, why we’re doing it, and take them on a journey which includes them.
“That co-production is now vital, because with the NASEN review, we were ticking things off, but there was not strong enough governance. So, we were happy at the centre but there was no overview of how well we were doing.”
Was Mr Walker therefore surprised at the SEND Review findings?
He replied: “I was part of the SEND Review process as a headteacher and was one of the first schools to be interviewed by the panel. So, I was well aware, from a school point of view, of where we were, but also the things that weren’t right.
“It was one of the main reasons that I applied for the SEND secondment: I’m passionate about inclusion and it felt right for me to take that role, because I knew things weren’t right.
“So, I don’t think there were any surprises in the SEND Review. I think, to be fair, we knew where we were and things needed to improve.
He added: “There were 50 recommendations in the NASEN review, but it focused a lot on operational matters, whereas this SEND Review was less about box-ticking and much more about strategic, systemic and longer-term thinking.
“In the strategic plans that we’re now working on, there is a focus on external high-level governance. I want to be held to account for the job that I’m doing; to find out if I could do it better or if I need to speed things up or slow things down.
“I want that external governance, which will hold me, schools and the public purse to account.”
In practical terms, Mr Walker said that one of the solutions was ‘upskilling’ teachers.
He said: “Teachers are in a really strong place, but they have probably had a lack of training in areas of SEND.
“We’ve taken headteachers and SEND Coordinators on a journey so far. There are great examples of good practice at Haute Vallée, Le Rocquier and other schools where they are incorporating things like adaptive teaching and reasonable adjustments as part of a Continuing Professional Development package. They are taking those concepts and really running with them, and we are also offering training to support that journey.
“It is developing a closer relationship between CYPES in the centre and schools, to enhance the provision for pupils that need that kind of support.”
Mr Walker’s own school has two ‘Additional Resource Provisions’ for SEND pupils. These used to be called ‘Additional Resource Centres’ but Mr Walker felt that that put too much emphasis on a physical location.
He said: “It is working really well here. Before, when a child needed that specialist provision, I couldn’t cater for them and that really hit home, personally.
“I’m all for inclusion and I want to see a child that starts at Plat Douet finish at Plat Douet and to celebrate their whole time with us from age two to 11.
“We set up the ARPs because some children who needed a place had siblings here, but they would have had to have left for another school and secondary catchment area.
“We started off with one ARP last year, catering for younger children. We worked with the centre: we set it up, we did our research, and we started to train our teachers with CYPES to build a programme of continual development.”
Mr Walker added: “It’s working really well. Nothing is fixed: the children move in and out of the ARP, accessing mainstream learning when it’s appropriate and working to individualised timetables, which themselves are flexible.
“We might have children who start on part-time timetables, just to get them embedded, but they will move on to more hours when they are ready.”
Mr Walker used the example of a child that your correspondent met at the school while being shown around. That pupil had not been in a mainstream school for several years and had instead joined a small number of other children in a bespoke provision, where the focus wasn’t on mainstream curricula.
Mr Walker said: “He’s moved to Plat Douet and has adapted really well. We are taking it slowly but he’s out at play with everyone else today, in a playground with 200 children, and he was out of school on a trip last week.
“He accesses a specialist teacher for some of his learning but he is in lessons for other parts. That bespoke curriculum has been a great success.”
However, Mr Walker added that that tailored approach had to be balanced with equitability – meaning that each child still needed access to a full, broad and balanced curriculum.
“Their learning should not be narrowed just because they are in the ARP,” he said. “We should look at every individual child, take into account all their needs, and get the right professionals around the table to plan the pathways available.”
Plat Douet has two ARPs and each one has four curriculum pathways. The younger ARP, for example, has ‘leaves’, ‘twigs’, ‘branches’ and ‘roots’. ‘Roots’ might be children who need help to stay focused, while a child on the ‘branches’ path might need one-to-one support to engage with learning.
Mr Walker said: “We will put each SEND child on a pathway, and that will guide our journey. They might start with ‘roots’ but progress up to ‘twigs’.
“It is very much a case of ‘stage, not age’: we might have some of our Year Five children on ‘roots’ but some of our Year One children who are on ‘twigs’.”
One of Mr Walker’s key jobs with implementing the recommendations of the SEND Review is to look at how ARPs are structured in all schools. This might mean creating specialist APRs to address different needs.
He said: “If you look at Mont à l’Abbé, for example, they offer excellent provision for the highest level of physical need; but what they can’t cater for is the highest level of provision for children with a social, emotional and mental health need. That is not their main focus, so we have a different, better provision for those children.
“If children that need access to an ARP are all in the right places, then inclusion in mainstream schools can be achieved. If we have children everywhere who don’t match, then inclusion won’t work.
“Part of the SEND Review is that ARPs have become more generic, and maybe they should be more specialist. It is something we are looking at, and it is part of our strategic plan.
“We will have to look at where the ARPs are located but we are a small island so should be able to transport children around. However, it is better for them to go close to their home because you don’t want to spend all day travelling in the rush-hour traffic.
“That is part of a bigger piece of work, and with demographics and the future of schools, with the numbers falling, we’ve got options and opportunities.
“That said, we need to retain our budget because the needs of children are growing so the percentage of children with additional needs is growing, and we need to retain the staff we have. Those staff must feel valued and skilled to a level that meets the children’s needs. I don’t think that’s necessarily always been a focus of ours.
“We need to upskill the existing workforce because we have some incredible talent in Jersey. With the demographics we are facing, we can probably work on building in provisions and support with the staff who we already have.”
Mr Walker said that building relationships was also key.
He said: “My behaviour policy at Plat Douet is called our ‘relationships and regulation policy’ because relationships are crucial to everything. In a classroom, you still need routines, structures and consequences but the relationships you have with the children are crucial.
“You also need two-way, open and honest conversations with parents. I think we do that very well at Plat Douet with our family link worker. In my SEND role, I also see a lot of good work has been done around raising the voice of pupils and parents.
“Although parents know their child the best, you still need expert knowledge, so CYPES, parents, pupils and schools all need to be part of that co-production going forward.”
Mr Walker said he was optimistic for the future.
He said: “I came to Plat Douet on a one-year secondment in 2012 and I’m still here; I’m so proud of the work that has been done here. We’ve faced lots of challenges but when you walk around the school today, you see a school that is calm and focused.
“If I approach the SEND Review as I have being a head, and focus my whole attention on the children and making things better for schools and children, then things will be amazing in the future.
“Do I think it’s going to happen by Christmas? Definitely not. Do I think it’s going to happen in the next year? No, but positive things will happen. We are focused on immediate priorities for year one. There’s a medium-term plan for the next three to five years, and then there is a long-term plan for five to ten years.
“Now, if we’re realistic yet pragmatic and systematic, we will get to a really good place, but it’s going to take time and a lot of work, and we’ll need to make sure that the right people are around the table.”
