While consistency is vital, flexibility is important as well, particularly when we are thinking about how to support children who have special educational needs and disabilities. Schools need to make reasonable adjustments where a child or young person has a physical or mental disability that puts them at a disadvantage compared to others. Essentially, we are levelling the playing field, to create equitable provision for all.
While clarity and consistency over expectations and policies are very important, sometimes there is a very good reason why a learner needs reasonable adjustments such as scaffolds, support or adaptations, in order to try and meet the same expectations as everyone else. Just as we would scaffold our teaching, to support learners who are struggling, so we can effectively scaffold our approaches to behaviour, to do the same.
1. Consider the learner and the environment:
There are lots of other ways in which you can make reasonable adjustments to the overall environment to better support learners with their behaviour. These strategies can help young people avoid behaviours that are caused by a struggle to concentrate or to cope with certain aspects of school. An example of reasonable adjustments in this scenario could be to move the displays in your room from around the board, to create a clear line of sight and avoid sensory overload for a learner who has difficulties with sensory processing. Another example of reasonable adjustments might be to allow a pupil to access the dining hall a few minutes early, to avoid the anxiety caused by noise and large numbers of peers.
2. Think about access to curriculum:
The key to make reasonable adjustments for all learners to be able to access the curriculum, because this allows them to learn. Where a learner struggles to write because of dyslexia or dyspraxia, you could offer a laptop for writing tasks to allow them to achieve a feeling of success. For instance, reasonable adjustments for a pupil who has a learning disability such as dyscalculia could include offering concrete resources to enable them to understand and access a maths task. Confusion and lack of understanding about learning tasks can often lead to what we might label as ‘off task behaviour’. By scaffolding learning in this way, we should hopefully be able to avoid these issues arising in the first place.
3. Put yourself ‘in their shoes’:
Figuring out what ‘reasonable adjustments’ might look like involves trying to empathise with learners – what does school ‘feel like’ to them, and how might you overcome any problematic experiences? For instance, take a moment to think about your school uniform requirements and how your pupils will feel in the uniform. Is it possible that your requirements without these reasonable adjustments are potentially causing distress for young people with sensory difficulties, with allergies or with autism? An example of this would be around the use of wool for some uniform items, causing itching for a child who has an allergy to it. Remember that we have a duty to make reasonable adjustments ahead of time, not just to respond once an issue has been noticed, so think carefully about sensory demands.
4. Remember that not all needs will have been identified:
It is not uncommon for SEND to be identified surprisingly late in a child’s school career, or even when they are an adult. For instance, adults who are identified as having ADHD and autism, which was not spotted at school. Under diagnosis of autism is particularly a problem in female pupils. Colour vision deficiencies or ‘CVD’ (what we used to call ‘colour blindness’) are often not identified early on, particularly because the NHS sight test no longer routinely checks for this. However, around 1 in 12 boys in your class will have CVD. Teachers need to be aware of the potential impact of using certain colours and make reasonable adjustments for young people who are colour blind, for instance to show different types of feedback (i.e. pink for ‘well done’ and green for ‘targets’ when marking). You can find useful information about this type of SEND here.
Find Out More
Sue Cowley has created two brand new modules, ‘The Importance of Consistency in the Secondary Classroom – What the Research Says’ and ‘Practical Approaches to Consistency in the Secondary Classroom and School’ which explore why consistency is the ‘golden thread’ for supporting behaviour in secondary schools and how teachers need to be aware of the effect of internal biases in a secondary setting. To find out more, view the tasters and click through to view the full module descriptions below.
Author: Sue Cowley
Sue Cowley is an experienced teacher, trainer, presenter, and author of over 30 books on education and parenting. She has worked in early years settings, primary and secondary schools in the UK and overseas, and provides training and consultation services to teachers and organizations worldwide.
