Anticipating predictable needs and acting to address those early helps us to achieve a better relationship between what a child needs to learn and what they are being taught. This ensures that the education provided is both ambitious and achievable.

One way of doing this is through early intervention, but it isn’t always clear that we have a shared understanding of what this means or how best to maximise its impact.

What we tend to mean by “early intervention” is responding rapidly to barriers to learning to minimise their impact on the pupil’s experience of being educated and their learning outcomes.

But do we always intervene as “early” as we could?

Much early intervention requires a teacher to notice that a child is struggling. When that “noticing” happens depends on a number of different factors: the teacher’s depth of knowledge of the child, of how they usually engage with learning, and of what they know already and what they need to know next.

And once barriers are identified, there can be a temptation to look towards diagnoses and then base interventions on generalisations rather than specific individual need.

Predicting pupils’ needs

It is important to acknowledge that effective early identification can be tricky, that identification can come later than it should have done, and that the resulting interventions are sometimes ill-fitting to the needs identified.

So, how could we improve this process?

While many schools have adopted different models to achieve better and earlier interventions, the particular approach we have adopted at our school centres on a structural system of universal needs-based assessments.

At its core, this is about ensuring that we have the most detailed understanding possible of the individual children we work with as early as possible.

While we may be informed by a diagnosis where it exists, we are fundamentally led by the needs of the individuals we work with and our deep understanding of them.

For us, it works like this.

Upon entry to the school, we systematically conduct a series of initial assessments with every child. The focus of these assessments is the specific knowledge and skills necessary for effective later learning. The idea is that we are acting in anticipation of a need that is predictable for our community, rather than waiting for a teacher to notice that a child is struggling.

By carefully analysing the capabilities of our pupils in this manner, we are able to put in place programmes of learning to pre-emptively address the gaps, rather than waiting for a cycle of escalation to stimulate a response from staff.

This means we are acting before the consequences of those struggles extend beyond finding the work too difficult - for example, to the development of emotional distress or disengagement, which could compound barriers to learning and make them even more acute.

We find this approach works very effectively, but we have to be cautious, too: this approach needs to be highly refined to minimise the risk of poorly targeted interventions.

For example, what may appear on the surface to be a difficulty with phonics may actually be caused by fragility in the foundational knowledge, such as auditory processing skills, memory or shape discrimination, to name just a few of the important areas.

In fact, when we developed a Readiness for Reading and Writing assessment to support this process, the number of foundational areas stretched to more than three pages before arriving at what would be more traditionally understood as phonetic concepts.

Just this one example shows how many poorly targeted interventions may have been put in place if we had not taken the time - and had the system - to pinpoint the right ones.

This twin approach - a highly focused identification of need and a rigorous construction of intervention - has meant that we are able to act incredibly early in addressing barriers to learning. It is also important to note that nothing in this approach is tied to our school or dependent on a particularly specialist body of knowledge. It could be applied in any school, and is probably already successfully in place in many others in different forms.

Tips for early intervention

When reflecting on early intervention in your setting, it may be helpful to consider the following first steps:

• Consider whether the assessments you use to identify why particular outcomes are not achieved go back far enough developmentally. For example, are you looking just at phonics proficiency or at the core skills that underpin the early knowledge necessary for effective decoding?
• Ensure that staff have sufficient knowledge of the prerequisite concepts that pupils require to successfully understand and apply what they are being taught. You can do this by focusing on securing a shared understanding of the developmental sequences that underpin key conceptual understanding, particularly where they stretch back into earlier age phases than those being taught.
• Perform an audit of the systems you have in place to identify and provide support for predictable barriers to learning in your setting, and how staff are enabled to act with consistency across the organisation.

As we experience greater complexity in our schools, the need for effective early intervention also increases. We need to encourage approaches that are predicated on professional curiosity and a desire to build a detailed understanding of the individual. If we do that, it can help us to make the process of education, and the very experience of being in school, a more positive one for all.

Simon Knight is joint headteacher at Frank Wise School in Oxfordshire

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