On 4 July, we will welcome trust leaders from across the country to our annual Trust Leaders’ Conference, Delivering Inclusive Excellence, in collaboration with the Confederation of School Trusts (CST). Our aim for this day is to engage in deep and thoughtful dialogue about the challenges and opportunities we face in creating truly inclusive educational environments. We will draw from our collective wisdom to chart the action needed at all levels to ensure every child has an excellent education and feels a sense of belonging in our schools.
In her keynote, Leora Cruddas CBE, CEO of CST, will share her insights on emerging inclusive excellence in trusts, emphasising the ongoing journey toward inclusivity. Leora offers these reflections with humility and a commitment to fostering quality education for every child and we are delighted to reproduce them here.
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Emerging insights into Inclusive Excellence in trusts
Good morning colleagues
It is a privilege to be invited to speak to you today on the theme of insights into emerging inclusive excellence in trusts. I will stress initially the focus on ‘emerging.’ I am not claiming to be the authority and I offer these insights with some trepidation and humility.
At the highest level, I believe inclusion means that every child has the right to quality education and learning, and that all children feel like they belong in our schools. The high quality trust framework speaks to high quality and inclusive education. So, I think we cannot claim that our schools provide high quality education if this is not true for all our children.
While it is helpful to adopt the broadest definition of inclusion, we need to be specific about which groups of children our school system is working less well for. This includes:
- Children with special educational needs and disabilities
- Children who are living in poverty and those living in destitution (food poverty plus shelter insecurity)
- Children in the care system and those with a social worker
- Children who are deemed to be young offenders and those at risk of offending including gang-involved children
- Children experiencing mental ill health
- Children living with acute health needs
- Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and those fleeing violence
- Children living in families where there is domestic violence, drugs or unsafe homes and those experiencing trauma
This list attempts to capture the range of experiences of our children for whom the system may not be working – but there will be others not captured in this list. The point is that all these children have a right to high quality education and to feel like they belong in their schools and communities.
So what would a truly inclusive education system, in which all young people thrive, look like?
Our paper published with Ambition Institute, Five Principles for Inclusion (Newmark and Rees, 2023), sets out what we think inclusive schools look like. Although written from the perspective of what inclusion looks like for children with SEND, we think that these principles are more widely applicable.
- Dignity, not deficit: Difference and disability are normal aspects of humanity – the education of all children should be characterised by dignity and high expectation.
- Greater complexity merits greater expertise: All children deserve a high-quality education – where extra support is needed, it should be expert in nature.
- Different, but not apart: Encountering difference builds an inclusive society – children with different needs should be able to grow up together.
- Success in all its forms: Success takes many forms – we should value and celebrate a wide range of achievements, including different ways of participating in society.
- Action at all levels: Change happens from the bottom-up as well as top-down - everyone has the agency and a responsibility to act.
A corollary of the first question of what a truly inclusive system would look like is what prevents us from having a truly inclusive education system now?
A range of factors beyond the control of individual schools and trusts are challenging, for example funding, workforce supply, elements of accountability and the paucity of services around our schools. These are all part of CST’s election strategy. The next government must address these strategic priorities.
However, we also believe in action at all levels (our fifth principle). Change happens from the bottom up as well as top down and everyone has a responsibility to act. We believe that by adopting our five principles, schools and trusts can start taking action now.
So it seems pertinent to ask on election day, how should a future government remove those barriers?
Creating socially just, inclusive schools is a complex social issue that is related to societal attitudes, political and policy priorities, economic conditions, legal frameworks and global events. The challenges facing each of the groups of children identified in the list I cited are complex. It is important that we understand that we are dealing with complexity. If it were simply a case of removing some barriers, we would already have done so.
We could benefit from considering Rittel and Webber's 1973 formulation of wicked problems in social policy planning in which they specified ten characteristics:
- There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
- Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
- Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
- There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
- Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
- Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
- Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
- The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
- The social planner has no right to be wrong (i.e., planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).
However, this does not mean we should do nothing. This is hard work requiring us to analyse complex problems and design solutions. Swartz (2018) argues that “simple answers make us feel safer, especially in disruptive and tumultuous times. But rather than certainty, modern leaders need to consciously cultivate the capacity to see more - to deepen, widen, and lengthen [our] perspectives. Deepening depends on our willingness to challenge our blind spots, deeply held assumptions, and fixed beliefs. Widening means taking into account more perspectives and stakeholders - in order to address any given problem from multiple vantage points. Lengthening requires focusing on not just the immediate consequences of a decision but also its likely impact over time.”
We want to quote extensively from an article written by Luke Sparkes, chief executive of Dixons Academies Trust and a trustee of CST. He offers three policies for the next administration to deliver the civic partnerships our communities need:
- A smart government would craft a joint workforce plan between local services, enabling multi-disciplinary work to happen smoothly, effectively and with efficiency that isn’t cruelly reductive to what the price is today.
- A visionary government would mandate local convening partnerships in every local authority: make people who live and breathe communities the core of the solution.
- A bold government would understand that schools cannot act in isolation: we need a national mission to reset child protection and wellbeing, fix the parlous state of children’s services and the care system, and fully recognise that childhood is now partially online.
Luke goes on to say: “Education is a profession of ideas and delivery: we have proven that we can continue to deliver on the vapour trails of budgets long wrung dry. But the world has changed and so must the system. We need a government who listens and responds, and who understands that a nation is built of individuals. Of one child, at one table, learning day by day.”
So if we are focusing on what government should do, the analysis of the problems affecting each group identified in my list requires a different formulation. And just because something is hard definitely does not mean we should put it in the ‘too difficult’ box. The crisis of our vulnerable children demands that we work harder and think harder.
A final point, we should be extremely wary of legacy mindsets. Policy solutions from the early part of this decade will not help us now. The social, political, economic and global context has changed fundamentally since the turn of the century. Legacy thinking and legacy policy is unlikely to help us now.
We must be ready to work with a new government. So the conversations we have today are vital. What specific policies could bring about the change we seek?
Building on what I said previously, the greater our ability to stay with a complex problem and to analyse it carefully, deepening, widening, and lengthening our perspectives, the more likely we are to design good policy. It is important that our policies have a specificity that seeks to address the challenges our children face, acknowledging that solutions will not be true of false, are not enumerable and are probably not certain in terms of outcome.
Let’s take a couple of specific examples. Save the Children and The End Child Poverty Coalition have estimated that removing the two-child limit would cost around £1.3 billion 2023/24 – less than 1% of the welfare bill and would lift 250,000 children out of poverty. Another example is changing the assessment process for Education, Health and Care Plans so that it is designed around dignity; and passing legislation that requires the Department of Health and Social Care to fund/ provide for section G (health care provisions reasonably required by the learning difficulties or disabilities).
This is the kind of specificity of policy solution we need to be looking for.
A final word: large outcomes framework-type solutions will not suffice. This kind of thinking prevalent at the turn of the century can be directly linked to New Public Management. New Public Management has run its course in relation to public service reform. Its target-orientation is drawn from big business. It lacks sophistication and specificity and is unlikely to help us address the complex challenges of building socially just, inclusive schooling and society.
Let me conclude with what CST is asking all political parties to address if they form the next government:
Our political leaders, schools and school leaders have a foundational question in common – how do children and young people, and those who educate them in our schools flourish?
- How do we create school environments where human flourishing is both the optimal continuing development of children's' potential (the substance of education) and living well as a human being?
- How do we address the multiple negative impacts of the pandemic and the current economic challenges we face?
- How do we create school environments where all our children feel that they belong?
- How do we mobilise education as a force for social justice?
The challenges that face us as education leaders are beyond the reach of individual institutions or single actors (even the state actor). They require a different mindset and mental model of leadership. They require us to think deeply and analyse complex problems, staying with the problem, and designing policy solutions that are specific to the nature of the problem. If we are to mobilise education as a force for justice and build socially just and inclusive schools, we must work together to deepen, widen, and lengthen our perspectives. This requires action at all levels. And it requires forms of radical collaboration.
So my invitation to you today is, what will you do? Tomorrow, in your schools and in the trust you lead? Through your professional networks? If you accept that agency and action happens at all levels, and that change happens from the bottom-up as well as top-down, what will you do?