Leave Them Kids Alone! The Alphabetti Spaghetti of Inclusion

Think back for a moment – if you can bear it – to the types of children with whom you shared your classroom. As sure as eggs is eggs, I’ll bet you’ll recall the earnest spods, the fidgety, the uninterested, the larkabouts, the corpulent, the shirkers, the smelly, the clowns and the downright thick. In fact, a cross-section of people that mirrors humanity itself.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the modern-day classroom still contains all these glorious archetypes – thankfully – but the terminology, at least that used by educational establishments, has shifted somewhat.

My college announced recently that, given our position in the Ofsted inspection cycle, we can expect our next visit sometime within the following six months and that, consequently, this country is at war – sorry, I mean, we need to become “Ofsted ready”. Any readers who are not lucky enough to be part of the state education sector can never really comprehend the tremors that ripple through an establishment at the mention of the ‘O’ word. Muscular senior leaders are keen to prove their joylessly efficient organisational skills; weaker teachers tremble that this is the moment they will be unmasked, while the majority of staff hunker down and hope that the storm will pass them by.

Each inspection cycle comes with a fresh framework focus, a tail that can wag an entire college dog. For example, a few years back Ofsted had a particular focus on ‘Cultural Capital’, that is, the requirement for institutions to show that they were more than just exam factories (ha!), and that they possessed the skills to develop the ‘whole child’ in pursuit of some version of an Aristotelian education. A fine ideal, but in the hands of the tick-box mentality of college leaders this became a hastily convened series of extracurricular activities delivered by teacher ‘volunteers’. I’ll go to my grave remembering the bemused expressions of the students in my Film Club who were being force-fed Italian neorealist cinema. And at the end of inspection? Bye-bye Bicycle Thieves.

This year’s framework focus is ‘Inclusion’, again a fine ideal that will measure “how effectively a school or provider identifies, assesses and meets the diverse needs of all children, particularly those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) or other vulnerabilities”. Now, you might think that the most effective way to achieve this noble end would be for a teacher to get to know their students well, sensibly tailoring resources and delivery to individual needs in an attempt to net all within the class. However, this is a little too woolly for a bureaucratic mindset that requires an evidence trail of ‘actioning’. Enter the Inclusivity Spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet, displaying a seating plan for each class, records students’ names alongside colour-coded initials drawn from a blizzard of inclusivity terms and is expected to be rolled out whenever a ‘visitor’ appears. A green S for SEND is perhaps the most pertinent and useful, flagging physical disabilities, dyslexia or autism spectrum conditions – genuinely debilitating needs that rightly demand a teacher’s careful attention. But the SEND umbrella also shelters less tangible entries. Take the vague ‘sensory impairment’, which often mandates resources on particular coloured paper, despite limited or no robust evidence that it actually helps; a typical pile of class photocopies ends up resembling an explosion in a paint factory. Many students experience anxiety, ranging from reluctance to read aloud, to requesting a seat by the door, to staying home entirely. Good luck finding a catch-all strategy for that. And then there is the strangely amorphous ADHD, encompassing everything from severe, disabling hyperactivity and impulsivity to milder inattentiveness. Whatever the flavour, it seems disproportionately the preserve of sharp-elbowed middle-class families who can afford private assessments, entitling students to 25% extra time in the exam room.

The blue D for Disadvantaged is a curious one. Indicative of pupils from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, a teacher is left scratching their head as to what to do with this information. Affect a sympathetic head tilt when they enter the room? Adopt a condescending “Everything all right at home, lovey?” tone in conversation? Slip them a fiver? As someone who started life as a big blue D, I would have been humiliated to discover that my teachers were weighing me against my more prosperous peers. It feels more stigmatising than empowering.

The most bizarre note, though, is the yellow BTL for Barriers To Learning, a ragbag of teacher observations as to why a student might be underperforming. Comments here include “disorganised”, “messy folder” and “procrastinator”. Dear reader, might I venture that 90% of us should therefore be labelled BTLs? Here is an educational mindset that sees the acquisition of knowledge as a smooth, rational, straight-line trajectory, rather than the messy, alchemical, deeply human process it actually is.

Lining these printed seating plans side by side is a depressing sight: young people, with all their glorious idiosyncrasies, reduced to crude daubs of colour and an alphabetti spaghetti of ‘conditions’, all for an exercise that feels more performative than genuinely useful. This relentless focus on what is wrong with people rather than what is right brings out my inner Victor Meldrew. I am tempted to rearrange the class to spell out BOLLOCKS TO THIS, but there are not quite enough letters. Yet.

Yes, let us help those in genuine need. But for the vast majority? Leave them kids alone.

Dave Summers is a Sixth Form teacher and his name is a pseudonym.