According to leading teacher Charlotte Peverett, without the right whole-school support structures and solid Tier 1 instruction in place, individual teachers can easily get swamped by admin and planning duties in the charge to cater to students’ diverse needs.
The experienced special educator from Lake Colac School says the student disability space demands a huge commitment from schools.
“There’s a lot of paperwork that goes into schools supporting students with disabilities, they have the disability inclusion profiles, the NCCD data, ILPs, behaviour support plans, crisis plans…
“They always talk about differentiation, and it’s just a lot of stuff that schools (can) get bogged down in the paperwork of it all,” Peverett tells EducationHQ.
What students with disability really need is “just good practice”, at the classroom level – and lots of it, she adds.
“(It’s about) teachers understanding how students’ learn, because once you have that … then you can actually develop lessons that are going to be accommodating for all students, rather than it being disability-specific.”
And while targeted supports for some children are critical, we should be wary of thinking their learning needs are entirely unique to that of their peers, Peverett suggests.
“We need to have an awareness that sometimes if we go too far down that line of ‘disability, disability, disability’, then it’s actually a deficit effect for our students, because the difference isn’t that stark.
“It’s just that students with disabilities need extra time, extra practice, more intervention, and more supports – but it’s also around the structures in schools (that help teachers to have the biggest impact),” she says.
Recently the educator delivered a pointed presentation at a Sharing Best Practice event, where she outlined her thoughts on why we need to ‘cut the fluff’ in special ed.
Peverett says her address was really a ‘call to leadership’ to support teachers by establishing the right frameworks and instructional protocols for them to draw on.
“If the structures are in place within a school, and we’re talking about behaviour structures, we’re talking about routines, we’re talking about these non-negotiables at Tier 1, then it’s easier for the teacher in the classroom to teach because there’s all this backing behind them.
“And then they can modify on the ground the lessons that they need to modify, because there’s clear structures in place on how to do that – the detail needs to come from the top, so teachers actually [can] do what they need to do on the ground,” she says.
In her own school, Peverett says she and other leaders “take on a lot of that background load” to free up their teachers to, well, teach.
Staff wellbeing has improved greatly because of this, she reports.
“Whole-school priorities are put back onto the teachers a lot, and when you have a student with any diverse needs in the classroom, you’re at the coalface every day and you’re having to manage [everything]…”
Charlotte Peverett recently made a ‘call to leadership’ to support teachers by establishing the right frameworks and instructional protocols for them to draw on.
Lake Colac teachers work with ‘very specific’ policies and procedures that leave no room for disruptive behaviours to flourish, Peverett notes.
“We have schedules and routines ... on the ways we walk around the school, on what classrooms need to look like – how they’re set up so the students have minimal cognitive extraneous load when they walk in – what fonts teachers have to use. It’s very, very, very specific but it gives teachers that guidance on how to do it well on the ground.”
These clear expectations feed into students’ high expectations of themselves too, she says.
“And being in a specialist school where predominantly we’re known for having students with severe behaviour (issues) – we get a lot of students from mainstream schools with severe behaviour – and when they come to us, within a couple of weeks, we don’t even know that [was their history] because there’s so many supports in place.”
Just two or so students, out of a cohort of around 85, are on behaviour support plans, Peverett adds.
“And they’re learning as well. Our academic data is through the roof.
“So it’s putting all those things in place, as part of leadership, that we’ve been able to take a lot of the load off the teachers.”
The Victorian Government’s Disability Inclusion program, which is in the final year of its four-year roll out, has upped support for students with disability via a number of measures, including a tied funding model that gives additional funding to schools to help individual children succeed and take part in education alongside their peers.
Peverett says she’s been saddened to hear students being talked about in terms of the money they attract in some schools.
“I think that’s really sad, that our students with disabilities or neurodiversities or complex backgrounds are being talked about like that because, yes, we need [the funding], but what are we doing with it as well?” she queries.
Rather than employing extra support personnel, there are other more impactful measures that this funding could be used for in schools, Peverett argues.
“The money could actually go into things that support the student, like extra intervention or teachers getting trained to learn more about disability – that’s a better way to impact change for our students, not just putting it into getting more staff.”
Click here for a previous EducationHQ story in which Peverett calls on school leaders to stop employing those without lived experience of autism to deliver staff PD on how to support autistic students.
