we are coming up to the busiest time for tuition and that has been keeping me a little bit busy, however I have been ruminating over many of the issues that are facing our young people in education so thought it might be time to get some of it out of my head and on paper.
This blog post focuses on the children we teach that have learning differences. I would use the more commonly known phrase, 'learning difficulties' but in my twenty plus years of working in education I have come to view the all encompassing SEND student title very differently. It strikes me that there is less of the 'difficulty to learn' in many cases, we are just not providing the right environments for them to thrive. Incidentally, I believe this could be said of most of our students at the moment.
I started out life in special education, as a highly committed teaching assistant. In the late 90s I was part of the structure of support in school that facilitated the success of inclusion. There was time dedicated to preparing and resourcing personalised programmes of study which a student could access, that would underpin the work that their main teacher was doing with them in the classroom. it was about collaboration, team teaching and a multi-agency approach to supporting children who could not access the curriculum as well as their peers, which in turn helped them cope better in class. This is mainly because back then schools had funding for this.
Fast forward to 2020, much of this funding has disappeared and children with significant learning needs are no longer getting the support they need. This is having a disastrous effect on student's progress and self-esteem. It is more than likely one of the contributing factors to the decline in behaviour in schools, and more worryingly their mental health is suffering as a result.
Students with dyslexic brains, which are now believed to be as many as 20% of the UK population, can possess some of the most technically brilliant minds but are often labelled underachievers because of the way they need information to be presented before they can access it. Autistic students can quite easily struggle with sensory overload in a classroom setting, but if allowed to absorb information in calm environment they can also learn at the same rate or exceed the progress of their peers.
I currently have a case load of ten students, all of them possessing some form of learning difference, but not one of them is incapable of achieving academically - and yet they are all 'underachieving' in school. Now as an ex-class teacher myself, I am not suggesting that class teachers are at fault here, I am more than aware of classroom constraints. Both teachers and students need more support in schools, they are both being failed.
It is true that some teachers are better equipped to teach students with a diverse range of needs, but not all - this is something that should perhaps be addressed at initial teacher training level. I was lucky. By the time I had qualified as a primary school teacher, I had spend eight years undergoing various specialist training as a TA and given responsibility for the progress of a number of students in the school. I learned a lot about matching education to children's individual needs and how to support them so they could work more independently in the classroom. I understand the frustration of standing in front of a class of thirty students, knowing that you are not going to reach all of them.
As a specialist home tutor, I spend the bulk of my time assessing the areas that the students are struggling with and finding ways to address this. For this I am afforded the luxury of 'time' and not having to stick rigidly to a curriculum or traditional teaching methods - my creative approach to teaching comes in handy here, although can get a few funny looks when I am singing maths formulae at the top of my voice! I aim to provide my tutees with strategies to overcome the obstacles that they experience in class, but also foster self-belief. They CAN achieve, because I am teaching them the way they learn.
It is sad that currently only children with parents who can afford to pay for a tutor will get this extra support. Although there are some students who do manage to secure funding, this is extremely rare though and is often used as a last resort when the child's resilience is at an all time low and they refuse to attend school. In an ideal world we would teach in a way that allows all students to access the lesson, take a multisensory approach that stimulates young minds, instead we appear to have resorted to incessant information dumping that overwhelms them. Teachers are under so much pressure to cover an often unrealistic amount of content.
I love my job. It's a privilege to work with the young people that I support. Tutoring neuro-diverse students is not without its challenges, and I don't have all the answers, but the rewards can be amazing! And they are amazing too.
DU
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