The Education and Care of Children with Severe, Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities

Musical Activities to Develop Basic Skills

Richard Aird

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134124138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is a practical guide to managing the whole curriculum for children with severe learning difficulties (SLD). Crucial guidance and effective strategies are provided on how to reconcile the rights, needs and aspirations of such children in light of recent national trends and QCA guidelines.

CHAPTER 1

A recent history of rights, needs and deceptions

A question of entitlement

By the beginning of the new millennium, the United Kingdom’s National Curriculum for education had been in operation for a decade or so and a wealth of material had been published about the relevance and implementation of that curriculum for pupils with severe learning difficulties (SLD) or profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD). Throughout the 1990s, enabling the rights of those pupils to access the National Curriculum had become something of a holy grail for academics and practitioners alike. The fact that the bulk of the National Curriculum was largely irrelevant and meaningless to the circumstances of many pupils with SLD/PMLD only seemed to excite further exploration and interest in discovering the key to the whereabouts of that holy grail.

Quite soon after the publication of the Education Reform Act 1988 (ERA88), the title of the newly published National Curriculum became synonymous and interchangeable with that of the more socially acceptable title of ‘entitlement curriculum’. A common entitlement to the newly defined National Curriculum was presented as one of the cornerstones of ERA88 and in many ways ERA88 was seen as an Act that championed the right of all children to benefit from a minimum standard of educational opportunity. For many teachers it was the principle of entitlement that was felt to justify the imposition of the National Curriculum upon the special-school sector, regardless of the obvious short-comings of that curriculum in terms of its relevance to pupils with special educational needs (SEN).

The design and content of the National Curriculum were not without some criticism, particularly in schools that specialised in the education of pupils with SLD/PMLD (SLD schools). This criticism was primarily because the starting point of the curriculum material tended to be pitched above the ability of many of their pupils and because the pace of learning was too great to allow for the relatively modest attainments of pupils with SLD/PMLD. However, SLD schools sought to implement the full National Curriculum, confident in their ability to modify the curriculum framework so as to make it more relevant to the abilities of their pupils. There were remarkably few pupils with SLD/PMLD disapplied from the National Curriculum, despite the provision of Section 18 of the ERA88, which allows pupils with SEN to be disapplied from all or parts of the National Curriculum in response to their individual circumstances. Head teachers of SLD schools took their collective stance upon the moral high ground that the principle of entitlement afforded and empowered the right of their pupils to benefit from access to the emerging broad and balanced National Curriculum.

During the early 1990s this ethical stance was reinforced by more pragmatic and mundane considerations. In addition to the provision of a National Curriculum, ERA88 also brought into being the Local Management of Schools (LMS) initiative. Rumour and conjecture was rife during the early 1990s with the belief that wholesale disapplication of the National Curriculum for pupils with SLD/PMLD might make the funding of SLD schools vulnerable and put the future of these types of school in doubt. This was a prospect that few SLD school head teachers were prepared to risk for the sake of criticising the quality of the National Curriculum.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the prevailing ethos of SLD schools had been one that continued to advocate the rights of profoundly disabled children who, prior to the Education (Handicapped Children) Act 1970, had been denied access to a formal education. For many SLD practitioners, the National Curriculum was welcomed as representing another incremental step towards achieving the same social and legal rights for disabled children as those that were enjoyed by their nondisabled peers. The promise of an entitlement curriculum was regarded by the majority of SLD practitioners as something sacrosanct, and the benefits that would accrue to pupils with SLD/PMLD, as a consequence, were considered to be irrefutable. When teachers experienced difficulties in engaging pupils with SLD/PMLD in a meaningful way within the newly defined National Curriculum, attention was not focused upon the irrelevance of the curriculum material but rather upon ways in which teachers needed to make their pupils become active participants within it (Carpenter 1990).

Seeking ways to access pupils with SLD/PMLD to the National Curriculum became the preferred, politically correct way of lobbying for the rights of pupils with SLD/PMLD. There were few arguments advanced during the early 1990s that identified any need for a national strategy with which to establish common standards in the education, care and treatment of children with SLD/PMLD, despite the fact that the SLD sector had only been in existence for some two decades and was thus still in its infancy. The government had responded to calls for equality by developing a National Curriculum to which all school children had an equal entitlement, and the quality of education provided to all pupils – whether disabled or not – was to be determined by appraising the performance of pupils within the assessment framework of that curriculum.

With the demise of initial specialist teacher training in the mid-1980s, there had been a reducing pool of teachers who had a proper understanding about the aetiology and pedagogy of pupils with SLD/PMLD. It was unfortunate that, as the effect of this reduction in specially trained teachers began to bite in SLD schools, teachers were confronted by a National Curriculum that had little in common with the existing SLD curriculum they had inherited, and consequently teachers in SLD schools struggled to come to terms with the demands being imposed upon them. Despite brave words of advice from authors such as Sebba et al. (1995), implementation of the National Curriculum inevitably led to some dilution of the sound SLD curriculum practice that had been developed during the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, during that time many head teachers in SLD schools confused the task of empowering the rights of their pupils to access the entitlement curriculum with unwittingly allowing increased societal control of the way in which SLD schools functioned. Not all of these things were necessarily damaging, but undoubtedly they served to confuse SLD practice at the time and have continued to do so.

By 1997 some 34 per cent of teachers in SLD schools were reported as disagreeing that the National Curriculum offered a proper basis for a curriculum that was appropriate to the needs of their pupils (SCAA 1997b). Certain practitioners at that time declared that teachers in SLD schools were unknowingly participating in some kind of conspiracy of deception (Humphrey 1997) in their efforts to try to reconcile the teaching of the traditional SLD curriculum with the often alien subject-based material of the National Curriculum. Despite a growing sense of scepticism about whether it was possible to reduce subjects of the National Curriculum to levels that were relevant to the abilities of some pupils with SLD/PMLD (Turner 2000), the search continued unabated for identifying the means of allowing these pupils full access to their entitlement to the National Curriculum.

Seeking ways to make pupils with SLD/PMLD actively engage with the National Curriculum continued throughout the 1990s to be one of the primary concerns of authors who specialised in the education of these pupils. This preoccupation was despite authoritative advice that the National Curriculum was only intended to form part of the whole curriculum and that special schools should maintain a curriculum that was relevant to the needs of individual pupils (Dearing 1994; SCAA 1995; 1996a). The flood of advice about the various ways of differentiating how the National Curriculum could be used in SLD schools also continued, despite research findings indicating that the implementation of the National Curriculum had had minimal impact upon actual school practice (Halpin and Lewis 1996). This lack of impact was associated with the fact that teachers in SLD schools generally regarded the National Curriculum as being irrelevant to the needs of their pupils and/or only accepted its importance at the level of rhetoric (Marvin 1998). However, other forces were at work to ensure that the rhetoric of the National Curriculum would be taken seriously, regardless of its relevance to the needs of pupils with SLD/PMLD and regardless of the views that teachers in SLD schools had begun to voice.

The threat of failing school inspections being undertaken by agents of the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) during the 1990s no doubt encouraged the majority of SLD schools to fall into line and to continue to put the implementation of the National Curriculum at the top of their priority list. The threat of failing an OFSTED inspection was a powerful and motivating factor that worked to ensure the rhetoric of the National Curriculum could be seen to be implemented in full in the majority of SLD schools. Towards the end of the 1990s, the DfEE published findings from OFSTED inspections reporting that some 27 per cent of special schools had been found to have serious weaknesses or had been placed on special measures – a percentage that the DfEE advised was greater than those found in mainstream schools (DfEE 1998a).

Around the same time, some authors began highlighting the need for specialist curricula in response to specific disabilities. For instance, Powell and Jordan (1998) advised that the curriculum for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) should be based primarily upon individual pupil need rather than upon a National Curriculum that had been developed for non-disabled children. The cultural values relating to academic subjects of the National Curriculum were felt to be too far removed from the immediate needs of pupils with ASD to justify placing these subjects at the core of the special school curriculum. However, despite the fact that a growing number of pupils with ASD were being educated in SLD schools by the end of the 1990s, few SLD schools could be seen to be making the development of specialist curricula a matter of priority.

Many SLD schools opted instead to bolster their implementation of the National Curriculum and invested in curricula that had been developed with the intention of making the subject matter of the National Curriculum subjects at Level 1 more relevant to the needs of their pupils (e.g. the EQUALS baseline packs). No doubt the threat of failing a second, more robust, round of OFSTED inspections, organised from the late 1990s onwards, prompted SLD schools to place a higher priority upon implementation of the National Curriculum than they did upon developing specialist curricula in response to individual pupil need. Some authors described the teaching of the National Curriculum in SLD schools in this way as being no more than a façade of competence (Barber and Goldbart 1998) that had been designed to satisfy the demands of OFSTED but that had little in common with good SLD practice.

The idea of developing a Pre-Level 1 curriculum gained momentum towards the end of the 1990s and the title of ‘P levels’ became the preferred shorthand when referring to curriculum materials leading towards Level 1 of the National Curriculum. As more material was shifted from the traditional SLD curriculum into P level curricula, a curious hybrid of developmental/behaviourist/academic criteria emerged that was then presented by organisations such as EQUALS as a curriculum framework against which the assessment of pupil ability could be standardised. The relabelling of traditional SLD curricula in this way was contrary to advice at the time, which warned against the folly of this elaborate pretence (Byers 1999). Clinical practices were crudely clumped together with behaviourist strategies such as task analysis in the naïve belief that pupils with SLD/PMLD could be made to follow generalised patterns of development at a comparable rate of progress with pupils from other schools, regardless of the idiosyncratic disabling circumstances that the pupils were subject to. Seeking to incorporate traditional PMLD practice into the P level assessment framework was perhaps the greatest folly of the time. Pupils with profound and complex disabilities have for many years been known to be notoriously poor consumers of generalised curricula (Ware and Healey 1994) and recognised as requiring a curriculum that is based upon their individual need (SCAA 1996b). Moreover, the assessment of pupils with PMLD has been shown as requiring entirely different strategies than the conventional approach to assessment developed in respect to the National Curriculum (Barber and Goldbart 1998).

Despite what was known about the pedagogy of pupils with profound and complex disabilities, the first year of the new millennium was heralded by a consultation document commissioned by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA)’s project entitled Curriculum Guidelines for Pupils Attaining Significantly Below Age-Related Expectations (Tilstone et al. 2000). Rather than seeking to define a discreet, tailor-made National Curriculum for pupils with SLD/PMLD, the emphasis of this major initiative was once again focused upon empowering pupils to access the National Curriculum by means of the jumble of developmental/behaviourist/academic strategies that had become known as the P levels. The P level strategy was pursued by the QCA regardless of the findings published in The P levels Project (University of Durham 1999), which had demonstrated that, following trials of pre-Level-1 curricula, there had been a minimal impact on the raising of educational achievements reported for the majority of pupils with SLD and none at all for pupils with PMLD.

The belief that P levels were able to offer a framework for standardising the assessment of pupil ability within the whole curriculum was promoted from 1999 onwards, particularly by EQUALS, an organisation that encouraged individual SLD schools to compare the outcomes of their pupils’ learning, in relation to the P levels, with those of other SLD schools across the country. This curious development did not appear to be prompted by the DfEE but grew out of the efforts of a small yet determined group of SLD head teachers. The use of P levels in this way sought to spite the proven shortcomings of P level curricula and its inherent assessment framework, and to spite also the government’s advice that the National Curriculum was only ever intended to form part of the whole curriculum, with curriculum planning for pupils with PMLD needing to be directed by individual need rather than by adherence to subjects of the National Curriculum (SCAA 1996b).

During the year 2000, Lancashire Local Education Authority (LEA) went one step beyond the work of EQUALS with their grandly titled, Performance Indicators for Value Added Target Setting (PIVOT). The PIVOT package (Lancashire LEA 2000) extended the notional content of P levels, with the belief that pupil performance upon P level curricula may be used as value-added criteria for appraising the effectiveness of SLD schools on a national scale. Both EQUALS and PIVOT appear to have ignored the basic fact that the innate disabilities constraining the majority of children with SLD/PMLD dictates that they are unlikely to follow any generalised patterns of development (Brown et al. 1998). Attempts to impose hierarchical P level extensions onto the assessment framework of the National Curriculum in this way are inherently flawed. Teachers in SLD schools need to be aware that recent developments in the use of P levels may pave the way for information from pupil performance on P levels to be used to provide ‘value-added’ data influencing the teachers’ performance-related pay. The possibility of such a development epitomises the worst form of societal control for governing the education, care and treatment of disabled children.

There have been, and will continue to be, benefits accruing to pupils with SLD/PMLD as a consequence of engaging them in subjects of the National Curriculum. Implementation of the National Curriculum in SLD schools led to a welcome broadening of the whole curriculum in these schools and to improvements in the manner in which pupils with SLD/PMLD were educated (Aird 2000a; Turner 2000). However, the design and content of the National Curriculum has not proved sufficient for providing a meaningful framework for defining good SLD practice on a national scale. Energy and resource that had been directed towards developing P level materials would have been far better directed towards developing a national strategy for guiding the development of the whole curriculum for pupils with SLD/PMLD. The P level initiative is not sufficiently relevant to the circumstances of severely disabled children as to be able to provide such a national strategy. As provision for pupils with SLD/PMLD progresses within the new millennium, it is not the development of P levels that should be given priority; instead, priority should be given to securing clarity of purpose for the whole SLD/PMLD sector, so that common sense may yet prevail.

Inclusion, value for money and accountability

Running alongside the implementation of the National Curriculum has been its stable mate from ERA88, the Local Management of Schools. The delegation of centrally held finances from LEAs direct to the governing bodies of schools was an essential component of government policy at the end of the 1980s and has remained so, despite changes in the complexion of government. The Education Act 1993 and the then Department of Education’s Circular 2/94 (1994b) confirmed that LMS was to be fully implemented in the special-school sector (termed ‘LMSS’). The section (276) that dealt with SEN issues in the Education Act 1993 was preceded and partly influenced in its construction by two important reports from the early 1990s jointly written by the Audit Commission and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education (HMI), namely Getting in on the Act (1992a) and Getting the Act Together (1992b). The common thread running through these reports, and the subsequent Act of Parliament, was concern about the lack of clarity that was felt to exist at that time regarding the definition of SEN and the manner in which pupils with SEN could have their education funded on an equitable basis (Aird and Bainbridge 1997).

Intrinsic to the matter of the joint Audit Commission and HMI reports was an emphasis upon the relative cost-effectiveness of integrating pupils with SEN into mainstream schools, as compared with maintaining them in relatively expensive special schools. Establishing value-for-money arguments for rationalised use of special schools provided a strongly motivating factor for some LEAs to place integration at the top of their priorities. It was significantly later that the DfEE sought to advocate (DfEE 1997) the educational and moral arguments for taking forward the integration (or ‘inclusion’, as it was termed in 1997) of pupils with SEN into mainstream education, thus demonstrating an unfortunate hierarchy of principles underpinning the dogma of inclusion during the 1990s.

LMSS became fully implemented in special schools by the mid-1990s, and the drive towards rationalising special schools continued with varying degrees of success in different parts of the country. Throughout the inclusion debate, there had been an enduring absence of any clear definition with which to govern the development of SEN provision. This was a shortcoming that an HMI Fish had commented on in the mid-1980s but that had been allowed to continue, despite the high profile of SEN in national strategy. Some ten years after the original observation made by HMI Fish (Fish 1985), the lack of clarity concerning the role of special schools and the nuisance of having under-developed methods for measuring special-school effectiveness were major findings in another report, Enhancing School Improvement Through Inspection In Special Schools (Sebba et al. 1996).

The drive towards developing an inclusive education system continued through the 1990s – regardless, however, of the fact that successive government strategies had failed to properly address known weaknesses in the SEN sector. In the publication entitled A Review Of Special Schools, Secure Units and Pupil Referral Units In England (OFSTED 1999), the authors concluded that special schools were becoming increasingly complex and alerted readers to the fact that SEN provision was failing to be developed along any unified national pattern. These were trends that had been known for many years but largely ignored by successive governments. The focus of attention remained upon the further development of the National Curriculum as a vehicle for securing an inclusive education system and for appraising the effectiveness of SEN provision.

The shortcomings of the National Curriculum have already been touched upon in the opening section to this chapter, and it may well be, sadly, that theories described as a ‘conspiracy of deception’ (Humphrey 1997) and a ‘façade of competence’ (Barber and Goldbart 1998) will continue to haunt the quality of teaching in SLD schools as we progress through the new millennium. It may have been that, during the 1990s, teachers in SLD schools were indeed guilty of compromising the needs of their pupils as they struggled to implement the National Cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 A recent history of rights, needs and deceptions
• Chapter 2 Strategies for securing clarity of purpose
• Chapter 3 Clarity of purpose for the whole school
• Chapter 4 Keeping pupils at the core of the curriculum
• Chapter 5 Specialist curricula at the core of the curriculum
• Chapter 6 Conventional subjects in the core and peripheral curriculum
• Chapter 7 Management of the learning environment
• References
• Index