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IN TOUCH – Education for Visually Impaired Children

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TX:Ìý 18.07.2017Ìý 2040-2100

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PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý LEE KUMUTAT

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White

Good evening.Ìý We’re concentrating tonight on what is one of the most contentious issues in visual impairment – education.Ìý And so it should be, after all it’s about the methods of teaching most likely to fit blind and partially sighted children for a world which tends to assume people can see perfectly.Ìý We’ve assembled three people who we hope can generate more light than heat.Ìý They may not thank me for saying so but between them they’ve clocked up well over a hundred years of experience in the field.Ìý So we’re treating them as a brains’ trust.

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Rory Cobb is the Chair of View, that’s the Association of Education Professionals Working with Children with Visual Impairment.Ìý He’s shortly to retire as the RNIB’s principal officer for inclusive education.Ìý He’s been in the service for 35 years.

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Annie Bearfield is an advisory peripatetic teacher.Ìý She’s been head of visual impairment teams in two local authorities.Ìý She produced a major report on social inclusion.

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And Frank McFarlane.Ìý He taught at St. Vincent’s School for the Blind in Liverpool for 36 years.Ìý He also attended two special schools as a pupil in the 1950s and ‘60s.

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You all began your training at about the time that the 1981 Education Act marked a major shift in attitude.Ìý It said that wherever possible disabled children should be educated in the mainstream.Ìý Rory Cobb, can you recall the mood of that time for someone like you just starting out?

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Cobb

Yes I started out working at a special school for visual impairment, which was New College Worcester and at the time I think there was a fair amount of hesitation about whether it would work.Ìý I remember colleagues at New College Worcester saying – you can integrate partially sighted children, you can’t integrate blind children.Ìý There was suspicion, I think, and concern that it might not be doable in practice.

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White

Annie Bearfield, the stated aim was inclusion, although we tended to call it integration then.Ìý Has the meaning changed as well as the word?

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Bearfield

Yes it was integration, which was very much about providing resources, making the environment accessible, modifying the resources.Ìý I think we’ve moved to a more holistic model of support where we look at the whole child, we look at the child socially and emotionally now.Ìý Inclusion now by visually impaired teachers is not just about accessing the curriculum, it’s also about enabling them to gain high self-esteem and to be at one with their visual impairment within a sighted community.

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White

Let me bring in Frank McFarlane because you too had just started out on your teaching career in a special school.Ìý What was your attitude to this development, which after all was potentially very different to the way that you’d been educated yourself?

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McFarlane

I was very, very hesitant about it, very unsure and I think there was a lot of resentment about it at the time.Ìý The school I was teaching at – St Vincent’s – actually since the mid-‘60s had been sending one or two academically strong – and that’s important at that time – academically strong students to local grammar schools.Ìý And in those days I think it was if they were academically strong they’d be alright – probably.Ìý And I think to take up Annie’s point – it wasn’t thought to be so much concentration on the whole child.Ìý If they were socially acceptable that didn’t seem to come into it, they were just shoved in there and got on with it.

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White

I want people to get a picture of the kind of mainstream environment that visually impaired children were and are experiencing when this experiment – as it was then – began.Ìý And I’m interested in how it’s changed and has provision changed with it.Ìý This is Kelsey, aged 14, describing his working day just a year or so ago.

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Kelsey

I’m completely blind with two artificial eyes.Ìý I had my left eye removed when I was a baby and my right eye removed when I was six years old, so I haven’t been able to see anything for eight years.

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We are about to do form time activity before lessons in the morning.Ìý So I’m currently reading what’s on the sheet in front of me which is Braille and this is currently titled – ‘Should we stay or should we go – the European Dilemma’.Ìý This sheet would have been submitted by my form tutor to a team of LSA – learning support assistants – who work with me and they would have prepared it into Braille and printed it off in Braille and it’s been given to my form tutor to put on my desk for this morning.

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We’re about to go off to maths.Ìý From my form I’m going to go via the learning support department to meet a LSA or learning support assistant who supports me in maths and then we’ll go up to maths from there.

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I started learning my way round school like 18 months before I actually started in year seven, so halfway through year five, so I’d had a lot of familiarisation but I don’t think I really properly got to know it until I was here sort of all-day every day.

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So I’m currently looking over some old work, it’s a revision lesson, I’m reading Braille which is currently about frequency tables.Ìý And I’m going to work from the Braille possibly with a Brailler which is how I produce Braille in lessons or possibly orally, with Miss Montague, my LSA in this lesson, learning support assistant.Ìý

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[Speaking to the LSA]

She’s given me data in terms about the frequency tables but I haven’t got diagrams like these, I don’t have these.

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In things like maths and science where there is a lot of graph drawing on the board, a lot of demonstrations, there is a learning support assistant with me who can explain what’s going on, if it’s not clear or they can draw it on a resource that is tactile to me so I can see what’s going on on the board.

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White

So Annie Bearfield, that’s Kelsey obviously in a pretty busy class situation and busy corridors and so forth, I’m just wondering how that situation has changed from the – what you might call – the early experiments to now?

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Bearfield

Well I think there are aspects that haven’t changed, so QTVIs – quality teachers of the visually impaired – and specialist teaching assistants, we’re all still modifying hard copy resources, so we’ll be providing large print, we’ll be providing tactile diagrams and Braille.Ìý But I think what that clip didn’t reflect is the role of technology and how that has transformed some children’s ability to access the curriculum in perhaps a more discrete way and more independently.Ìý For example, remote access to the board using an iPad, that’s cool technology now, it enables children to fit in more discretely, particularly in the secondary sector where children are desperate to fit in, desperate to be like their peers.

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White

But Rory Cobb that depends doesn’t it on the school being able to keep up, getting the equipment, knowing what the best equipment to get is?

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Cobb

It does and I think this is one of the issues nowadays.Ìý If you go back to the ‘80s and the ‘90s local authority visual impairment services were growing, they were quite strong, they were relatively well resourced and in recent years that has started to come under pressure and we know why because of cuts to local authority budgets.Ìý The balance of authority and responsibility lies much more now with individual schools and that makes perfect sense for most children because the more local you are to the child the better but with something very specialist like visual impairment it’s quite hard for schools to know what they don’t know and it’s quite hard for them to find the resources that they need to do a job properly.Ìý And that’s why I think regular access to QTVIs, well trained teaching assistants – these are all really important factors in making sure that the inclusion works well.Ìý And from the sound of it in Kelsey’s situation it does work well but I’m not sure that that’s replicated across the country.

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White

Frank McFarlane?

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McFarlane

I think also what’s important is that the teachers have to be geared up, they have to be astute to realise that they can’t just turn up for a lesson with a wad of papers that they can just dish out round the desks – and here you are read this kids.Ìý You can’t do it, you’ve got to be prepared, stuff’s got to be put into Braille or Kelsey with his diagrams etc., and that’s important and teachers are much better at it now than I think they were, I think they got a shock originally because some teachers did say well I didn’t qualify to teach the blind or the deaf, I don’t want to.

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Bearfield

I think you’re right Frank, joint planning is the key to successful access all round.Ìý But you know it’s hard, it’s challenging sometimes, we can spend many hours chasing teachers down corridors – ooh just a minute.Ìý But mainstream teachers are under far more pressure now in their daily job, the level of administration, planning, assessment that they are responsible for has grown.Ìý So you have to strike up a very supportive relationship as a peripatetic teacher with mainstream teachers, you have to acknowledge the pressures that they’re under and work with that.

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White

And would they be likely to have had any training on how to teach visually impaired children?

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Bearfield

Yes, I think one of the strengths of the peri services across the country is training, is delivering timely training sessions around the needs of individual pupils, whether it be whole school, a selected group of teachers or an individual class teacher and to teaching assistants.Ìý So I think we’re really good at that.

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Cobb

I would agree with Annie on that as long as you’re in a local authority which has good relationships with those schools because part of the issue, it seems to me, with the growth of academies is that schools are largely autonomous nowadays and some schools, particularly there’s a move now to maybe traded services, local authorities selling their services to schools and that depends on the willingness of that school to buy in that service in the first place.

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McFarlane

I’m chairman of a school board of governors in Liverpool and it’s a mainstream school, Church of England school, mixed, sixth form etc., and we – if we have some children with disabilities, strong disabilities, you may get some money but if Frank McFarlane, totally blind, is allowed into the school then you don’t necessarily get very much money, if any, and it’s assumed that the SENCO – the Special Educational Needs Coordinator – will know all that they need to know and will sort it all out.

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White

Annie Bearfield?

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Bearfield

I think there is pressure on school budgets and the peripatetic support services are funded – the school budgets are top sliced and specially needs children are funded through the higher needs block funding.Ìý Now there is pressure on that in every local authority around the country.Ìý The children who are at risk from not receiving the specialist VI teachers’ support are the mild to moderate children.

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White

Do you mean mild to moderate in terms of sight?

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Bearfield

In terms of their sight yeah.Ìý Significant numbers of these children however will have additional needs, they may have a learning difficulty, they may have a behaviour issue and looking at those children holistically the specialist input from the QTVI is critical to their access to the curriculum and to their outcomes, their lifelong outcomes.Ìý So many services or some services I know are working to capacity rather than to need, so they’re having to cut their cloth according to the amount that they’re funded.Ìý There are two local authorities within the West Midlands who have been cut back to the bone in terms of their teachers and specialist teaching assistants.Ìý Those services will not be looking at children with mild to moderate visual difficulties or visual impairments.Ìý Those children are at risk.

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McFarlane

I think Peter this raises the whole issue of a postcode lottery, as it’s commonly known, which under successive governments there’s been a resistance to the idea that you need to set any sort of national standard for how children with particular special needs are supported and the levels of support they should have.Ìý So if there’s a 150 plus local authorities in the country, there are 150 plus variations in – or potential variations in how children with a visual impairment – how much support they get.

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White

Can I just get you all to change tack for a moment because I’m thinking of parents of course because this is quite a confusing landscape that they’re hearing about and although much is made of parental choice parents don’t always feel that they get that choice.Ìý I want you to listen – this is Kafeel Jahangir who was worrying because he felt there was no appropriate provision in his borough for his visually impaired daughter whilst the borough wasn’t willing to send her out of the area.

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Jahangir

Well we’re June, my daughter doesn’t have a school as yet that she can go to.Ìý We were given a school in May and I’d already voiced concerns about that school not being appropriate for her because my daughter can’t just go to any school.Ìý Westminster have said that they’ll send her to girls’ school in Marylebone and they’ll set up a unit over there.Ìý I understand that but going to that school and seeing that school and talking to the school they know and we know that they can’t cope with my daughter.Ìý Not only that a child has social needs as well, it’s also being able to interact with children who have similar disabilities as herself and she doesn’t have that.

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That was Kafeel Jahangir talking a year ago.Ìý That issue was resolved in the end but Frank I imagine that’s a problem that the special schools, for example, come across quite a lot now the ones that are left because the boroughs and councils think they don’t have the money and think they can do the job.

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McFarlane

So often parents are in the dark, they don’t know what their options are.Ìý And unless somebody in the local authority gives them those options well then they’ll go where they’re told to go unless they are determined to go to tribunal and bang their head on county hall door.Ìý So often they say oh that’s all there is so we’ll have to take that.Ìý And I think it’s absolutely criminal that local authorities are supposed to give them all the options but they don’t.

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White

Annie.

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Bearfield

I mean I think that school choice is generally limited by local authority budgets – first thing to say.Ìý But if you look beyond that services can be creative as long as they’re committed to looking at how they give children access to a visual impairment community.Ìý So in our authority, for example, we have a youth club – a weekly youth club – we have residentials and we have day trips and family days.Ìý So we build a visual impairment community, a local community, so that our young people can feel comfortable, they can learn to accept the limitations of their visual impairment but not be defined by it.Ìý And it’s important, particularly if you’re losing your vision, it’s very important to have that opportunity.

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White

One problem that doesn’t seem to have been solved, if you look at the stats, is how far education, wherever you get it, is fitting youngsters for jobs.Ìý We still quote the three in four people of working age who aren’t actually in employment.Ìý What responsibility for that lies on education, wherever it’s given?

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Cobb

There’s been a big research project going on for the last six, seven years at Birmingham University looking at a large group of young people as they’ve moved on from school into further or higher education and then – now they’re coming out the other end at an age where they would normally be going into work.Ìý And I think what that is showing is that we know that visually impaired children, academically, do well compared to most other disability groups, what they seem to lack is the softer skills, the skills that are – if they get an interview it’s the difference between getting the interview on the basis of a paper application and getting the job.Ìý They may be lack work experience, I mean nowadays we know how hard it is to get a job if you can’t point to any previous experience.

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White

But bluntly that is the school’s responsibility isn’t it?

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Cobb

Well they should – and I think this again takes you back to the curriculum, the emphasis is very much on the academic curriculum, schools are increasingly judged by academic performance, we know the exam system has been tightened up now so that everything is based on how you do in your end of course exams.Ìý And all of that puts pressure on the additional curriculum that these children and young people need.Ìý And that’s where it seems that there’s a deficit – as they come out of the education system they may have the results, they don’t have those wider skills that their peers – sighted peers – may have.

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White

I said we wouldn’t be debating special versus mainstream, which we aren’t going to do, but I wonder is there another definition of special that we ought to be considering, i.e. some way of providing more funding, whether in or outside the mainstream framework.Ìý Rory, is that such a daft idea?

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Cobb

No I think the idea of it weighting the funding that goes into this area according to the needs of the children is very necessary.Ìý I suppose the government would say that that’s what the SEN code of practice and the framework and education, health and care plans should be doing already, that everything should be based on an assessment of individual need and the funding follows accordingly.Ìý But we know that different local authorities struggle with that.Ìý I think there is a case for top slicing the education budget and saying there are particular groups of children who need something that is special and on top of what other children get.Ìý It takes me back to the issue of visual impairment in children being low incidence and high need.Ìý We have England and Wales I think we’re talking about 25,000 children up to the age of 16, that’s a tiny proportion of the whole and yet those children have such an enormous range of needs, potentially, and you can’t have a one size fits all policy that is going to address those needs.Ìý I think what we need is a national debate that brings all of these issues together because the trouble with the way that we’re trying to address them at the moment is it’s piecemeal and you can’t deal with it because it’s the interrelationship between them that makes the difference.

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White

The trouble is when people say there should be a national debate what they normally mean is let’s have a working party, let’s kick the ball into the long grass and in 20 years’ time we’ll be in exactly the same position.

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Cobb

Well if you can find several million pounds to subsidise your idea of doing it another way then that would be great but I suspect it’s a case of going to government with as much evidence as we can find to say these children and young people deserve better.

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White

And that’s got to be it, we’ve only scratched the surface I know.Ìý There is an extended podcast of this debate which can be downloaded from our website.Ìý We’d love your views, your arguments, your experiences.Ìý You can call our action line on 0800 044 044.Ìý You can email intouch@bbc.co.uk.Ìý And that’s it.Ìý Many thanks to Rory Cobb, to Annie Bearfield and to Frank McFarlane.Ìý From me, Peter White, producer Lee Kumutat and the team, goodbye.

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