Student labels: love them or leave them?

Loosening up on our love for “labels” to develop a more inclusive mainstream practice that benefits ALL.

When I first started teaching, labels were big: if you couldn’t articulate the different strategies that you were putting in place for your School Action, your School Action Plus and your Statemented children, as well as your EAL, LAC, C/D borderline and students with low reading ages then you were simply not a very good teacher. And the possibility of this made me feel sick as an NQT.

Lesson plans had separate spaces for each possible label or category that students might fit into. Within these boxes we wrote down how many students had that particular need and the different strategies that we would use to support them. Lesson planning took forever and often, once I was in the flow of teaching the lesson itself, lots of those differentiated plans went out of the window; because as we know, students and learning can be unpredictable, and good teachers are responsive to needs as they emerge during a lesson (and are often unaware that this in itself is an effective “strategy”).

As an ambitious and conscientious new teacher, I believed that more resources and more time preparing these resources would mean better outcomes for students.

Over the years that followed I specialised in EAL and in improving the reading, writing and communication skills of students who weren’t making expected progress across the curriculum, and I developed an understanding that great practice for these students centred around consistent application of strategies such as:

• identifying and sharing keywords or “language for learning”;

• making learning visual;

• giving thinking time and response time;

• verbal rehearsal;

• providing sentence starters and writing frames at different levels;

• embedding reading comprehension and inference skills into the lessons;

• providing options for how students show their understanding, e.g., diagrams or tables; and

• using cloze paragraphs or matching activities that enable students to show understanding of higher level concepts when they don’t yet have a higher level grasp of the English language.

Following a career pathway that then took me on a SENDCO course and to a role working within a special school; I found myself once again feeling out of my depth, second-guessing my skill set and grasping onto labels once more in order to ensure positive outcomes for my students.

“Ah this student is autistic, therefore I must plan X, Y, Z”

“And then this student has global delay, so I must plan A, B, C”

“And then this student has SLCN, so I must plan D, E, F”

But then my understanding of effective teaching became much clearer and the bigger picture began to take form…

Whilst there are obviously differences in the experiences and the type of need that each student has, actually a lot of the strategies that have great impact are already in my EAL/language proficiency “toolbox” mentioned above. These “EAL” strategies are also key when ensuring my SEND students achieve…and actually, come to think of it - aren’t these strategies just the bedrock of good classroom practice for EVERY student? Because who doesn’t do better when they have more time to think about and talk through their ideas first with the correct terminology available? Or have help getting started on a written task or not having to write in full sentences when the learning and ideas are flowing?

The EAL toolbox is actually a “curriculum accessibility and potential toolbox”, which doesn’t sound as catchy but if deployed consistently in every classroom across the curriculum, could have a profound impact on the ability of ALL students to reach their potential.

And so, moving forwards with this understanding, I’m suggesting that within a mainstream setting:

• What if, rather than doing lots of different things for our EAL and SEND students, we made those core strategies just part of our day-to-day teaching and learning?

• What if we ensured that these strategies were woven into our medium and long term plans, across subjects and key stages?

• What if we curated a class-specific toolbox that was flexible and we adapted how we teach according to what all students need in order to access and then demonstrate understanding of what they are learning?

So finally, let’s consider: what could be the potential impact if we loosen our grip on labels (just a little) and we get really good and consistent at using a whole school inclusive toolbox to give all of our learners the opportunity to lean on these strategies? Because even if someone doesn’t have a label attached to their learner profile, it doesn’t mean that strategies from an inclusion toolbox wouldn’t enable them to work with more confidence, access more complex concepts or showcase their understanding and skills in a more timely or concise way.

(I want to add here that I am talking about mainstream SEND and EAL strategies, or students with MLD within a specialist setting, not about removing labels for students with a higher level of more complex needs. I also understand that labels form part of the bigger picture of school budgets and resource allocation and so I am solely talking about mainstream, day-to-day teaching and learning practice here).