In this series of 10 short blogs – which will issue in rapid succession – I will consider in turn the top themes that have emerged from 60 interviews with teachers, leaders, policy-makers, academics and others from across and beyond the English FE system. Each blog will end with a question which I hope will generate debate on LinkedIn, where the blogs are signposted.
The core question considered has been “what might be the features of a self-improving FE system?” Interviewees have also considered the key features of the FE system as it stands, and what is holding it back from being self-improving.
In this tenth blog of ten running through major issues discussed by my interviewees, I come to an issue that I kept noticing by its absence. I will try to reflect what my interviewees thought about this ‘elephant’ and suggest what it might mean for the system.
Of the 61 people I interviewed across a multitude of roles in and around FE, a grand total of two mentioned students with Special Educational Needs or Disabilities in their reflections on the system and how it could become self-improving.
I found this astonishing. There are over 80,000 learners aged 16–25 with Education, Health and Care Plans; and as anyone who has had to fight for one knows, they are hardly handed out like sweeties. On a different scale, AoC’s briefings suggest that around 26% of learners aged 16–18 have an additional learning need; although nobody I met seemed to think this was an accurate figure – everyone always said that in their experience the true number is much higher in the part of FE that they are familiar with. (I have no good reason to doubt the AoC’s figure; I think this dissent tells us something different, as I discuss below).
Whichever way we look at it, catering for students with SEND would seem to be a huge aspect of what the FE system in England does; yet virtually nobody even mentioned it when talking system design and system improvement.
After a while I got so exercised by this omission that I decided to start breaking my own interview rules in order to explore it – albeit breaking them in a very specific and controlled way. If I got to the end of the interview and it hadn’t been mentioned, I reflected back to the interviewee that they hadn’t mentioned it – and that this was normal in my interviews – and asked them if they had any reflections on that. This didn’t really elicit a huge amount of additional commentary, but some of the responses were along the following lines:
There is of course a degree of validity in each of these types of responses. But I am still left at the end of this project feeling that there is something very odd about the fact that FE is the part of the education system where learners with SEND are over-represented statistically, and yet it never features highly in anyone’s narrative (other than those whose job it is, like NATSPEC).
I think there are several possible explanations. One could be that it really isn’t a significant factor when thinking systemically – after all, students are students, they all follow a curriculum, all take qualifications, all need teachers, etc. But I don’t really buy this – labels are neither wicked nor useless, but rather short-hand ways of drawing attention to some facts about the shape of the world; in this case, the fact that ‘normal’ or ‘mainstream’ educational provision needs modification of some description if it is going to be maximally effective with the learners being referred to. If modification is needed – even if that simply means the teacher going about things in a different way in any sense at all – then this feels like an important issue when considered at scale.
Another explanation could be that the type of people who wanted to talk to me – a self-selecting group to an extent – are not the type of people who engage with issues of SEND. This is possible; though I’m not sure what it would mean.
A third explanation – and the one I think is the most likely and the most troubling – is that we don’t all have an agreed, comprehensive mental picture of what the FE system actually is. SEND gets forgotten because lots of things get forgotten depending on what the conversation is about or how it is framed. People are focused on the bits of the system most visible to them. If we’re talking about A, B and C then we’re not talking about X, Y and Z. And I think this in turn is caused by three things:
There is a great deal to be said about each of these themes. But that must wait for another day!
David Russell
Executive in Residence at Oxford Saïd Business School
Education and Training Foundation