Linda Graham was deep into research around hostage negotiation when she realised she needed to change the focus of her work into behaviour support in schools.

Rather than trying to teach teachers “de-escalation tips", her team pivoted to looking at prevention through inclusive pedagogy, because of what the children with behavioural difficulties they were interviewing were telling them.

“We asked the question, ‘What makes an excellent teacher?’ And the answers were all about instructional support,” explains Graham, who is director of the QUT Centre for Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

“[The students] were talking about teachers who explain things clearly, teachers who care about their learning, who want them to learn, and who will explain things again – who don't get angry at them for needing it to be explained again.”

Universal teaching key to inclusion

In other words, Graham’s team found that accessible, high-quality, universal teaching was the key to creating a more inclusive system that works for all learners, particularly when that teaching takes children’s language and attentional needs into account.

What’s more, she believes there is much that the UK can learn from these findings, as the Department for Education pushes forward with its special educational needs and disabilities reforms.

We sat down with Graham to find out more about her research into inclusive education and the support systems she has developed to help schools put her principles into practice.

Tes: Why is inclusion so hard to get right?

Graham: It's an incredibly difficult thing to do. That is not because inclusion itself is difficult. If you know what you're doing, it's really quite simple. The problem is that there are lots of people who don't know what they're doing because there's been so much misinformation over time.

And there really isn't enough space in the teacher education curriculum for teachers to nail down the intricacies of inclusive practice. This is why quality professional learning is so important and why we've been going this route.

Probably one of our biggest challenges is that we're trying to retrofit. There is lots of talk about mainstream, and that does my head in, because inclusion is not about bringing children with disabilities into the mainstream. That's integration.

Mainstream is the real problem. No one can seem to get their heads around the fact that that’s the thing that needs to change, because, actually, mainstream doesn't work for a lot of kids.

For the past six years, we've been working really hard to try and get everyone on the same page to say: OK, we're not talking about integrating into the mainstream. We're talking about making the mainstream inclusive. There's a difference.

Also, you don't need special schools if the entire system is inclusive. You only need a parallel system of other streams when you have a “mainstream”, right?

Essentially, what inclusive education is about is making the one system work for everyone, and there are ways to do that.

How would you go about making that work?

In Australia, we’ve been lobbying the government to invest in something called “integrated multi-tiered systems of support”, which is a support delivery system. It's a way of organising schooling with the aim of delivering support to whoever needs it, in the most inclusive way possible.

It is built around the child, but the whole child – so it is about academic support, behavioural support and socioemotional support. It's multi-domain and multi-tiered and brings together approaches that have been quite fractured in the past.

The real key to our system is that baseline teaching, what we call “tier one” or “universal” support, which is for all pupils, has to be bulletproof. It has to be high quality, but it also has to be accessible.

You then have tier two support, which is early and targeted support for pupils and might include things like reading interventions or social skills programmes to explicitly teach self-regulation, perspective taking and responsible decision making.

Then tier three is for those who need intensive or ongoing individualised support.

What does high-quality but accessible tier one support look like?

In Australia, we're starting to go down the English road of knowledge-rich curriculum and explicit teaching. And there's value in that. Being explicit is so important for kids who are neurodivergent. Clarity of instruction is so important. But that's not everything. Yes, we need quality, but we need it to be inclusive.

The message we're trying to send at the moment is that not everyone learns the same.

People like Professor Daniel Willingham have made the point that we can't differentiate too much, and that children largely learn the same way. But there's nuance that's being missed.

If you don't cater for differences in children's language ability, you're never going to get anywhere near working memory.

Yes, we all use the same mechanisms to learn. We all have working memory, long-term memory and so forth. That is a universal thing. But the cognitive processes that feed into those mechanisms are different, in that there are different speeds, different capacities and so forth.

Not enough attention is being paid to language and attention. If you don't cater for differences in children's language ability, and you don't support attention, you're never going to get anywhere near working memory.

We've been trying to get educators to teach for the differences between children and the differences in how children learn. If we can cater to as many children as possible at tier one, there will be fewer children leaking up into tier two and three.

Why would we want to prevent children from being in those higher support tiers?

Tiers two and three are the really expensive tiers of support, and they're expensive in a multitude of ways. If a child is needlessly needing tier two or tier three support (such as an intervention that takes them out of the classroom), that's expensive in terms of the cost to their learning through the gaps that develop that shouldn't be there, and the cost to their academic self-concept and their self-esteem.

But it's also expensive in that you have to spend money to identify children, and pay people to deliver interventions and so forth.

The sad truth is that so many of the kids who are leaking up into tiers two and three, who shouldn't be there, who have damaged self-esteem, and who are frustrated and angry and embarrassed, happen to have ADHD and developmental language disorder (DLD).

When you look at the kids who are getting suspended and excluded and ending up in pupil referral units, alternative provision and juvenile detention, it's those kids.

If we simply change the way we teach at tier one, they won't be feeling frustrated, angry, embarrassed, and so forth.

No, it won't work for absolutely everybody. We will still have to provide interventions and specialist support, but we will have to provide far less of it. And we should be providing that support in more timely and evidence based ways.

For that to happen, what would need to change about teaching at tier one?

For the past 10 years, we've been working on a programme of research called Accessible Assessment and Pedagogies, which is about shaping tier one to make it accessible for more children, but particularly those with ADHD and DLD.

We went against the grain of inclusive education by working on assessment first. Assessment drives so many things, but is also a critical gateway, and if you work on inclusive pedagogy and curriculum without looking at assessment, it all goes to pot when you get to assessment, because suddenly the guillotine comes down on the kid.

We looked at assessment task sheets, by which I mean the documents that tell students what they need to do in an assessment and what they will be graded on.

We picked English because it's the only compulsory subject in all Australian schools throughout education, and we chose Year 10 English because it informally operates as a sorting mechanism.

Everyone does general English up to Year 10, and then in Years 11 and 12 there are different English pathways.

We didn't actually change the task itself, but we changed the visual, linguistic and procedural accessibility of the task sheet. Then we broke student participants into two groups: those with language and attention difficulties consistent with ADHD and DLD, and those who didn't have those difficulties.

We wanted to see whether what is essential for kids with language and attention difficulties also works for everyone, and we demonstrated that there was a significant improvement in academic outcomes for all.

Many more children with language and attention difficulties were passing Year 10 English, which means more can then do general English in Years 11 and 12. That allows them to be on a university pathway and prevents them from being shunted off down a vocational pathway. They may end up on a vocational path because they want to be, but that's different.

The educational significance is huge, because that's life changing. Our partner schools also found big improvements in student engagement and behaviour. That was a welcome outcome, but given how this research started and with whom, that wasn't a surprise to me.

The idea of changing the language of a task sheet might remind some teachers of traditional differentiation. What’s your view on those practices?

We've done a big scoping review of differentiation, and found that “pure” differentiation, as it was designed in the beginning, Carol Ann Tomlinson's view of the world, was a good thing. It's important to meet kids where they're at.

But the problem is, it's hard to do properly. And so, we end up with a bastardised version of it, where we have different lessons for every child in the class.

Most of the criticism of differentiation is about that bastardised version, but that's not what it was meant to be.

The thing I disliked particularly about what differentiation became was the idea of splitting tasks or content into three different levels of the class. That puts a ceiling on the learning of particular kids, and I don't want that. I want everyone to have access to the same high-value knowledge, but I want there to be more entry points into that knowledge.

Beyond making assessment more accessible, what should teachers be doing in terms of pedagogy and classroom practice to make their teaching more inclusive?

Once we demonstrated that what works for young people with language and attention difficulties also works for everyone in terms of assessment, we started work on pedagogy.

What we did was not groundbreaking. It wasn't sexy. We drew from research in the US that uses classroom observations as a way of measuring the quality of teaching, and developed our own measure, which looks at the accessibility of teaching.

We worked with teachers on seven dimensions of practice, focusing on accessibility across clarity of instruction, vocabulary, support for information processing, support for attention, visual supports, as well as comprehension checking or checking for understanding.

We observed teachers, scored their practice, and then gave them feedback.

At first, the more experienced teachers hated us. It made them feel inexpert. They were telling us, “We do all these things,” and then we showed them in the data that actually, no, you might not be doing this really important thing effectively, consistently or frequently.

Comprehension checking was the easiest one for us to agree on, because what some would do was say, "Right, everyone got it? OK, moving on."

That's not what we wanted because that's an automatic practice, and the kids know that you don't really mean it. Many children will also not volunteer that they haven't understood something.

What would a more effective approach look like?

We started with a well-known practice we call on-demand questioning, where you don't ask the usual suspects all the time and look for them to give an explicit response.

If you are a bit more random and kids think you might call on them next, they're more likely to pay attention. And with explicit responses, the kid that doesn't get it is going to go, "Aha! That's what they're talking about."

Then we moved to more unconscious elements of practice, which are much harder to change.

A key move was to get teachers to think carefully about how much they talk, and to really dial that back, because kids will just sit there and let the talk wash over them. They're not doing the cognitive work, and teachers end up exhausted by the end of the lesson.

It is a myth that good teachers don't have to plan; that they can just go in and teach off the bat.

So we worked with teachers on talking less and getting kids to be more active through questioning and tightly aligned activities. That means you need to be more organised. It requires a really clear plan.

There's this myth in education that good teachers don't really have to plan; that they can just go in and teach off the bat.

I call that practice out, because that's actually cheating your pupils. You do need to plan. You need to know the content. You need to know how you're going to teach it.

There needs to be deliberative work done to decide: of all of the content I could teach on this topic, what is absolutely important for kids to know? And how am I going to make sure that they all get that?

We have observed what happens when teachers have not had the time to plan. They will talk for 70 minutes, and there's no real plan for what kids are supposed to walk away from that lesson with, and so they walk away with nothing.

There’s been a big increase in centralised curriculum planning. In your view, is that helpful, or is it working against the kind of inclusive practice you’re trying to achieve?

One hundred per cent against what we're trying to achieve. I gave a keynote last year for the Australian Council for Educational Leaders, in which I made the argument that teachers need to reclaim planning and assessment development.

They're losing this really complex intellectual part of their work – and it's an enjoyable part of their work.

The original Accessible Assessment and Pedagogies project I was talking to you about was with three secondary schools and was only in Year 10 English. We have now scaled up that work. Our latest project includes 10 schools, primary and secondary, across all subjects.

Last year, we accessibly redesigned 78 task sheets with 130 subject heads and teachers. But it's really so much bigger than that because what we're actually doing is getting into the curriculum in order to do that work. And the wonderful thing is that the teachers are coming alive.

We want teachers to know the curriculum. We want teachers to be designing and developing the curriculum, so they can assess it and they can make adjustments for the students who still need them. They've been rediscovering their subject. They're getting back to what they came into teaching to do, and that's what pre-planned materials rob them of.

What about the workload argument? Have there been concerns that your approach is creating more work for teachers?

What we've demonstrated is that there's initial work up front, but that is happening in a collaborative way. Some schools have taken teachers off timetable for a day a week, so that a teaching team can come together and do this work.

But that upfront investment then saves a whole lot of work from then on, particularly in the classroom and around marking.

Teachers have to provide less clarification, because they're being clearer upfront. There are more explicit steps for success, so pupils aren't bewildered anymore, and teachers are having to provide less corrective feedback.

I don't like when classroom teachers are treated like mushrooms.

I don't like when classroom teachers are treated like mushrooms. As far as I'm concerned, the classroom teacher is the most important person in a school.

Classroom teachers know the pupil. They are the person who needs to be making adjustments for them.

If we do a better job on tier one instruction and make it accessible to as many children as possible, then the work of classroom teachers is reduced, because they don't have to make as many adjustments as they might have to otherwise.

That frees up their time to make the adjustments they do need to make for some students, and I want classroom teachers to be doing that work.

When you're outsourcing that work, the person on the other end doesn't know that pupil.

No, I want classroom teachers to be given the time to do that work. Let's clear as much crap out of their way as possible. Let's really focus on what it is that we want children to learn. What is the most important thing? And let's teach that.

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