Michelle Haywood considers how the role of SENCo has become one where strategic decisions are increasingly important – so can we expect more of tomorrow’s heads to be one-time SEND specialists?

Back in 1978 – the year that Olivia Newton John and John Travolta declare their devotion to each other as Sandy and Danny in the film Grease – a publication entitled ‘Special Educational Needs: Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the education of handicapped children and young people’ was presented to the Secretary of State. More commonly known as ‘The Warnock Report’, its publication followed a detailed enquiry commissioned three years earlier to consider the needs of ‘handicapped’ learners.

40 years on, it’s hard to appreciate just how revolutionary The Warnock Report was in changing the narrative around SEN and its influence on subsequent government legislation. It did much to popularise terminology now firmly established around our educational narrative, such as replacing medical classifications with ‘Special Educational Needs’ for the first time and removing categorisations such as ‘handicapped’ and ‘educationally subnormal’. The ‘Statements of Special Educational Needs’ it proposed would continue to be used by LAs for decades to come

When it came to the business of managing SEND provision in schools, The Warnock Report didn’t use the term ‘SENCo’, but did suggest that headteachers within ‘ordinary’ schools should ‘delegate responsibility for special needs to a designated specialist teacher’ with an understanding of SEN, who would work with pupils in small groups or one-to-one to support pupils’ individual needs. There may have been no mention of how SEND support could be coordinated and managed across a school, but it was from these early beginnings that the SEND co-ordination we now recognise was born.

 

It was the 1994 SEN Code of Practice that first formalised the ‘Special Educational Needs Coordinator’ role, recognising it as a position within its own right. Many TAs who had shown expertise in supporting learners with SEND were assigned such roles, with the result that a number of schools came to be considered as having a wider knowledge of SEND matters. Following a change to the law in 2008, all SENCos were required to be qualified teachers; as of September 2009 it also became necessary for them to undertake a National SENCo qualification (NASENCO), within three years of being appointed.

One would expect a role first proposed in 1978, to change and evolve over time, and indeed that evolution has been well documented by Robertson and Morewood, Rosen-Webb and Done et al, among others (see references). A SENCo who would once have been identified as a ‘specialist teacher’ is still expected to be an in-house authority on a school’s provision for pupils with SEND, but may now also hold a range of other specialist qualifications alongside their NASENCO.

In 2014, the SEND Code of Practice identified four broad areas of need (communication and interaction; cognition and learning; SEMH difficulties; sensory and/or physical needs) operating within mainstream schools, specialist schools and at LA level. Depending on the context, that means there could be up to seven areas of specialism to manage across a school. It’s unlikely that a sole SENCO can specialise in all of them, yet there’s often an expectation among school staff that they do.

Slowly, though, a different picture of the SENCO role is emerging. There’s now a growing number of ‘hybrid positions’, stemming from the recognition that schools need specialist SEN knowledge to be by possessed by individuals in strategic leadership roles. Deputy and assistant headteachers are thus increasingly taking on SENCo duties, or else overseeing their school’s SENCo role. Some headteachers – particularly those in small rural schools who were once SENCOs themselves – are adding SENCo duties to their management roles. In MATs, a SEND Director may now be appointed to lead on SEND strategy across several schools..

Some headteacher and MAT CEOs – again, often those with direct experience of performing the SENCo role themselves – will actively encourage their staff to take on SEND leadership roles as part of their performance management process and apply for SEND positions in other schools.

A hybrid position

These different visions of the role may have been prompted by the 2014 SEND Code of Practice, which states: ‘The SENCo has an important role to play with the headteacher and governing body, in determining the strategic development of the SEN policy and provision in the school. They will be most effective in that role if they are part of the school leadership team.”

A quick Google search of current SENCo vacancies within schools suggests that the role as we understand it may be steadily morphing into a more strategic one. As things stand, it remains something of a hybrid position in terms of how vacancies are advertised. It’s not uncommon to see adverts describing SENCOs as ‘specialists working with the most challenging pupils in the school’, while stating that the duties involved will be undertaken as part of the SLT.

If Grease were to be remade today, the teenage romance between Sandy and Danny would still hold the film together, but numerous changes would be made, simply due to advances in technology and fashion. Similarly, while the overarching principles of The Warnock Report continue to shape how SEND is coordinated across a school, what we see now is far more focus on leadership. Now that every class teacher is expected to be a ‘teacher of SEND’, the SENCo role itself has become a hybrid of the traditional and the new, sitting somewhere between a middle and senior leadership role.

 

 

Done, L, Murphy, M & Watt, M (2017)

‘Change Management and the SENCO role: developing key performance indicators in the strategic development of inclusivity’ Support for Learning Volume 31, Number 4: 281-295

 

Morewood, G D & Robertson, C (2012)

Editorial, Support for Learning, Volume 27, Number 2: 51-52

 

Rosen-Webb, S M (2011)

‘Nobody tells you how to be a SENCO’ British Journal of Special Education, Volume 38, Number 4: 159 – 167

An edited version of this article appears in https://www.teachwire.net/assets/freecopy/senco.pdf