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15/11/2021

Disabled children still face exclusion in PE – here’s what needs to change
Children between the ages of five and 18 should do a minimum of 60 minutes of exercise a day across the week, according to UK government recommendations. And physical education (PE) is, of course, one of the main ways in which both primary and secondary schools meet these guidelines.

As disabled children are more likely to be sedentary, it’s particularly important that they can take part in school exercise. Surveys have also shown that most disabled children would like to be able to take part in PE more often. Yet our latest research, assisted by recently retired academic and former Paralympic athlete Dr Stuart Braye, shows that disabled children attending mainstream schools still experience many difficulties in joining in with PE lessons.

At the first world conference on special needs education held in Spain, in 1994, representatives of 92 countries declared that inclusive education was the right of all children. It should be the norm in all schools, they said.

Nearly three decades on, however, personal accounts of social isolation and non-inclusive mainstream education show that school, for many children with disabilities, is anything but inclusive.
Inclusive PE
This is especially true for PE. In 2015, UNESCO called for all educational establishments to ensure that inclusive, adaptive and safe opportunities to participate in PE be provided for disabled children. Yet despite advances in disability equality legislation both on a global level and in the UK specifically, this has long not been the case.

Research has consistently shown that disabled children experience a less-than-welcoming attitude in mainstream school PE. They don’t have access to the right equipment, they feel marginalised and excluded by both non-disabled peers and teachers. Crucially, PE teachers are not adequately trained to support their needs.

Inadequate teacher training
Studies also show that PE teachers feel under prepared and ill-equipped to include disabled children in PE lessons. In our recent study, for which we interviewed families of disabled children, PE teachers and teacher training providers, we found evidence that initial teacher training (ITT) programmes are inadequate.
One of the main reasons for this is that the once popular four-year bachelor of education courses have for many been replaced by one-year ITT courses. As a result, the inclusion of disabled children is only covered superficially.

PE teaching professionals also revealed that ITT provision interprets the term “inclusion” in the broadest possible sense. This means that disability becomes one among many equality issues to be covered as part of a full curriculum.

Our respondents said that the opportunity to work with disabled children during training is essential. Doing a placement within a school that caters to disabled pupils, particularly a special-needs school, would give student teachers the chance to build competence and confidence to develop appropriate inclusion strategies. Instead, our respondents said, many ITT work placements do not introduce trainee teachers to disabled children at all.

More input from disabled people into PE teacher training would also be beneficial. None of the participants in our study had ever heard of a disabled PE teacher. Indeed, research shows only 0.5% of the teaching workforce reports having disabilities.

Yet none of our study participants could think of any reason why a disabled person could not complete a PE teacher training qualification and practice as a PE teacher. Perhaps this is what it would take to ensure inclusive education, and inclusive PE, becomes a reality for all children with disabilities.

15/11/2021

Would a longer school day help children catch up after the pandemic? Here’s what the evidence says
COVID-induced school closures in 2020 resulted in the majority of pupils in England – at primary and secondary level – missing around 40 days of school on site. Schools around the globe were similarly affected, though to different extents.

As recent figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development show, in the first 12 months of the pandemic, 1.5 billion students in 188 countries and economies weren’t able to go to school, for varying lengths of time. Figures from the Netherlands and Ireland are similar to those in England. In Denmark, students missed closer to 20 days, whereas the numbers are much higher in Costa Rica (close to 180 days) and Colombia (around 150 days).

While most English schools during this time provided some form of remote education, these closures nonetheless resulted in learning losses. As a result, amid the UK government’s plans for post-COVID school recovery, the Department for Education has reportedly discussed extending the school day, by possibly lifting the existing cap on the number of hours state school teachers can be asked to work.

International evidence seems to suggest that, in some instances, a longer school day may be beneficial. A report by the United Nations-led Accelerated Education Working Group has proposed multiple ways to deal with pandemic-induced learning losses. These range from extending teaching time to implementing formal catch-up programmes with remedial education for struggling pupils. Extending teaching time was proposed as an appropriate strategy when pupils have missed out on up to one year of education.

Moreover, studies such as those conducted in the US and Canada and in Chile support the idea that extending instructional time could help pupils, both in the short and long term. They would benefit both academically (in terms of achieving higher test scores and higher educational attainment) and socio-economically (their future earnings would be higher).

However, a review of studies in Latin America and the Caribbean noted that, despite these benefits, there may be more cost-effective ways to attain similar results. An additional and important consideration would be the psychological cost to teachers.

Overburdened workforce
Of course, a longer school day means more teaching hours. And that raises the question of whether asking teachers to extend their working day is a reasonable request.

According to government guidelines, teachers at state schools in England can be asked to teach up to a maximum of 1,265 hours over 195 days of the year. This number does not include additional hours required for tasks, such as lesson planning, assessing, monitoring, recording, and reporting.

Data from four surveys shows that, pre-pandemic, an average full-time teacher in England worked 50 hours a week in term time and around four hours a week during the holidays. There are certainly outliers, including 10% of full-time teachers who reported working at least 30 hours per week over the summer and half-term holidays and 15 hours over the Christmas holidays. The researchers also found that the number of reported working hours had not decreased over 25 years. In fact, teachers in England have been found to work longer hours than most other countries, with lower secondary school teachers working around eight hours more per week

Our ongoing research into what being a teacher during the pandemic has been like shows teachers feel frustrated. The participants we have interviewed have relayed their distress at how the media and some sections of the public have portrayed their profession as lazy.

And the numbers bear out their frustration at that misguided impression. A survey conducted in June/July 2020 by the UK charity Education Support found that 31% of teachers and 70% of senior school leaders reported working more than 51 hours per week on average.

Since March 2020, many teachers across the globe have had to oscillate between partial school closures, partial reopenings and full reopenings. To adapt, they have had to rapidly learn new skills in order to be able to teach pupils from home.
They have also done a lot more than just teach. They have regularly called, and in some cases visited, pupils and their families to assess and meet their academic and welfare needs. Given the ongoing uncertainty of the situation, it is not surprising that we found that our teacher participants’ mental health and wellbeing had declined over the course of the pandemic.

While there may be benefits to pupils in extending the school day, one must be wary of the costs this would incur to teachers’ mental health and wellbeing. Students would not benefit from being taught by teachers who are stressed and burned out. For any educational recovery plan to be effective, it is important to consider teachers’ needs and perspectives.

15/11/2021

Too many neurodiverse children don’t have a full diagnosis – here’s why
Neurodiversity is an elaborate word for all the different atypical ways in which individual brains can function. It covers both learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, and developmental conditions, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

These conditions are more likely to be diagnosed in school-aged children than in later life. It is at school that the differences in how certain children function can become more apparent: the way one child might find it harder than others to grasp new concepts or another might have trouble regulating their emotions.

Over recent years, through research, TV, film, books and government strategies, there has been a greater awareness and understanding of autism. Concurrently there has been a ninefold increase in autism diagnoses over the past 20 years, according to a recent study.

Other neurodiversity conditions, though, have not seen the same kind of rise in diagnoses. But this is not to say that they are less prevalent. Many cases are incorrectly diagnosed, or not diagnosed at all.

According to Department for Education statistics on special educational needs in England, over 20% of children with such needs are labelled as having moderate learning difficulties. Yet as a developmental psychologist, working in schools in England, I have assessed over a thousand children but have rarely diagnosed children with moderate learning difficulties. Each child has had a range of specific needs that require targeted support, such as those apparent in dyslexia, or difficulties related to coordination, the senses, attention or language.

Nevertheless, research shows that the label “moderate learning difficulties” is often used in an overgeneralised way in schools as well. When teachers assess children without the involvement of a specialist, there is no reliable way of distinguishing between moderate learning difficulties and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia.

This suggests that a large proportion of children in England could have a neurodiversity that remains undiagnosed. Without a specific diagnosis, these children will not get the support they need. There is no informed and targeted plan in place to help them in their schooling.

How conditions are diagnosed
In childhood, diagnoses are generally carried out by specialist teachers, education psychologists, paediatricians and other health professionals. In order for a diagnosis to be accurate – and each child to be given the exact support they need – health workers and teaching staff need in-depth knowledge.

The fact that we use an umbrella term – neurodiversity – to designate these different, yet highly prevalent conditions, demonstrates the extent to which they can either seem similar or actually overlap.

Children with autism and dyspraxia often have similar coordination difficulties, for instance. Likewise, a dyslexic child might also have attention difficulties. Equally, 60% of children with reading difficulties and 80% of children with ADHD are reported to meet the criteria for having both dyslexia and ADHD.

All of the different difficulties a child might have will make it harder – in ways specific to them – to learn and understand how they feel. This is why health workers and educators, whose job it is to ensure the wellbeing and education of our children, need to understand each neurodiversity in all its specificity.

15/11/2021

15/11/2021