Top Ofsted rating for many SEN schools – so why aren’t we trumpeting success?

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jan/20/ofsted-sen-schools-outstanding

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Last term 35% of special schools visited by Ofsted inspectors received an “outstanding” grade. That’s a stunning rate, and yet no one seemed to notice.

Mainstream schools were far less successful – only 9% received the top rating. Yet, when free schools pulled the tiniest bit ahead of this, the celebratory roar within government was deafening. BBC Question Time became a weekly propaganda fest; press releases flowed from the Department for Education.

When the schools serving our most vulnerable children more than trebled that rate there was not a whisper. No minister touted the fact. There was not even a line of celebration in Ofsted’s annual report.

It is as though there is a collective blindness around special schools – perhaps because most parents can pack their child off to the school around the corner and never once need to think about the families whose breakfasts revolve around specialist transport or carer change-overs. Likewise, most politicians cater to the middle, not to this group of parents who are often too exhausted to be politically active.

Talking with special school headteachers, many say that being ignored is what has made them so successful. Away from the glare of politicians intent on using schools to garner votes, the staff of special schools can quietly focus on what really matters: making their school a welcoming place. Instead of focusing on what the data says an “average” child should achieve, and driving an entire class towards that goal, the smaller class sizes and more relaxed approach to progress in special schools means teachers can respond to the needs of each child, based on individual strengths and weaknesses. In that context, they say, it is easier to be outstanding.

That’s the rose-tinted interpretation – and it’s one I want to believe. But there is a potential alternative explanation.

When I spoke to parents of children with special needs, several wondered if the higher Ofsted grades were a function of less rigorous expectations on special schools.

Instead of brilliant schools, could it be that inspectors are overly moved by a syrupy view of disability? When they observe happy children with complex needs who appear to behave and look well treated, do inspectors whack out generous “outstanding” judgments as a way of rewarding the school for relieving society of its guilt about what to do with disabled children, rather than basing the grading on whether students are being fully extended to learn?

No one wants to believe this version. I certainly don’t. If we did, we’d have to accept that a group of people working their socks off in difficult conditions might not be doing such a good a job as we need them to.

Adjudicating between the two hypotheses is almost impossible though. I keep thinking of a student I taught with a rare and severe form of epilepsy. Each time she suffered a seizure, her development regressed. Numbers she knew one day disappeared the next. How could an inspector, unlikely to have heard of her condition and probably only in a classroom for 20 minutes or so,  truly know if she had been stretched to learn? It seems impossible.

A search for reports on special schools to resolve the conundrum draws a blank. While Ofsted writes thematic reports about what it sees in schools – in the last few years there have been reports on hair and beauty teaching, citizenship, and issues of special needs in mainstream schools – I  can find nothing specifically about special schools.

Why is there this dearth of information? One special needs headteacher I asked said more effort has gone into arranging ways to “throw out” special-needs children from mainstream schools than has gone in to improving the places where they are being flung. The documents, and a steadily rising number of children in special provision over the last six years, appear to back him up.

So which version of the story is correct? Are special needs schools an untrumpeted triumph of our schools sector, or is their success an example of endemic low expectations? One answer is more comfortable than the other. I hope that one is correct.