The need for support

Overview

Since the introduction of the new Support for Learning Act (Additional Support for Learning Act) (Scotland) in November 2004, the concept of what encompasses additional support needs has been extended considerably.  The term additional support needs, however, had already been proposed in the report ‘Moving forward! Additional Support for Learning’ in 2003 in order to move away for the term ‘special educational needs’ which many believed had negative connotations.

Chapter 2 of the Code of Practice (Scottish Executive, 2005) discusses the factors which may give rise to additional support needs and categorises these into four main areas: learning environment, family circumstances, disability or health need, and social and emotional factors.  Importantly, including the learning environment as a factor in giving rise to additional support needs puts the onus on the school and the individual teacher to take responsibility and how they might contribute, even inadvertently, to additional support needs.  Hopefully, in time all teachers will become aware that pupils’ additional support needs may also originate from school ethos, relationships, inflexible curricular arrangements and inappropriate approaches to learning and teaching.  Additionally, that schools which are not inclusive may actually give rise to additional support needs by excluding certain groups of pupils.  The ‘Count us in’ report by the HM Inspectorate of Education (HMIE, 2002) identified the characteristics of inclusive schools, highlighting indicators of successful schools and advocates key approaches to inclusive schooling.  These include the following features: an ethos of achievement for all pupils, to value a broad range of talents and abilities, to promote success and self-esteem by removing barriers to learning, to counter discrimination and finally to promote an understanding of diversity.  These factors, in not enforced, were highlighted by Hamill and Clark (2005) to contribute to additional support needs.

The Code of Practice further acknowledges that certain family circumstances such as homelessness, parental substance abuse, caring for parents or siblings and other factors may cause additional support needs but it may not apply to all pupils in similar situations.   The category of disability and health needs includes factor which can be regarded as the more traditional factors which may give rise to additional support needs.  The final category considers social and emotional factors and clearly highlights that pupils are considered as a whole person and not only in terms of educational issues.  Factors include being bullied, low self esteems and child protection issues.

I have been working as a part-time support for learning teacher in Support for Learning in a state secondary school X.  School X is a non-denominational, coeducational, comprehensive school that caters for pupils aged 11 to 18.  The School X has accommodation for 1455 pupils and is acknowledged for its excellent record of academic achievement.  So far, there has been no pupil who has been assessed as having Additional Support Needs as seen under the wider umbrella of the new Act.  I think there still needs a lot more work to be done in raising the awareness of teachers and pupils so that not only pupils who were traditionally being assessed as having ‘special educational needs’ are included but also pupils who can be considered as having additional support needs’ under the new Act.  

Investigation

I decided to select pupil Y as he/she is the pupil I work with most frequently every week giving me the best opportunity to assess his/her additional support needs.  Additionally, most of pupil Y’s teachers expressed concern about how little progress pupil Y had been making over the last year and in some subjects his/her behaviour started to deteriorate again and he/she also seemed to get into troubles/fights with older pupils.  His/her lack of progress was not only observed in the discrete subject areas but also evident in areas of personal and social development, e.g. not using his homework planner, never doing his homework and coming to school without any materials.

My initial thoughts from reading the IEP written by the principal teacher of Learning support was that pupil Y was a pleasant pupil with difficulties with literacy and numeracy in addition to concentration difficulties.  He/she had been diagnosed with dyspraxia.  As I had some experience with pupils with dyspraxia last year, I naively anticipated similar kinds of difficulties. My first few encounters in a classroom setting showed that pupil Y was good with oral tasks but also revealed that he/she was, at times, not very amenable to the support he was given and did not want a particular support teacher or assistant near him in certain settings.  I knew, however, that he/she accepted the support from a learning support teacher in Maths.

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In terms of collecting data to get a better overview of pupil Y’s support needs I wanted to explore the following four areas into which additional support needs can be categorised as outlined in the Code of Practise (Scottish Executive, 2005):

  1. Learning environment
  2. Disability or health needs
  3. Family circumstances
  4. Social and emotional factors.

To assess which of the above factors contribute to pupil Y’s support needs my plan was as follows:

  1. Learning environment:  In order to assess how import the ethos, relationships, inflexible curricular arrangements, inappropriate approaches to learning and teaching, and disrupted learning ...

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