Episode 163: The school that successfully brings maths mastery to visually impaired pupils

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School podcast.

Welcome to the School of School podcast.

Welcome back to another exciting episode of The School of School podcast. We've got the regular crew, the two most talented people on this podcast, or the two most talented regulars anyway. We've got Robin Potter and we've got Adam Gifford.

Robin Potter

Hello.

Adam Gifford

I'm keen to say hi back to you Andy. Hi Andy.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, that's right. Say hi. Not to me, to our audience, right?

Adam Gifford

Oh, yeah. To everyone. Hi everyone.

Andy Psarianos

That's right.

Robin Potter

Hi, everyone.

Andy Psarianos

We got an exciting guest today. We got Claire Craddock here from World's End Primary and just outside of Birmingham or inside of Birmingham, or on the outskirts of Birmingham.

Claire Craddock

Just on the outskirts.

Andy Psarianos

Just on the outskirts. Been to Claire's school a couple of times now. Very exciting. Thanks for hosting us. Every time we come by, you're always very generous. Your sandwich people make such great sandwiches.

Claire Craddock

Oh, I'll tell them.

Andy Psarianos

Tell them. Yes. Yeah, Claire, thanks for joining us. Come on, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Claire Craddock

So yeah, I'm Claire Craddock. I'm Deputy Head here at World's End Junior School. I'm in charge of maths. I look after assessment and teaching and learning generally. I also work a lot for Maths Hub as Assistant Maths Hub Lead, and I am a cohort one Teaching for Mastery specialist. So I am an active specialist on all of the phases of the Teaching Mastery Programme. I'm a work group lead, so I do subject knowledge for teaching maths, year five to eight continuity. I deliver the PD Lead Programme, so really, really involved with Maths Hubs and with NCETM. And I'm very recently a licenced Maths — No Problem! trainer, so I'm very excited about starting that.

Robin Potter

Crowd goes wild.

Andy Psarianos

All right. Well, that's really... I don't know. You should enter, there must be an award somewhere for the world's busiest teacher. That's so many-

Claire Craddock

Yeah, I am quite-

Robin Potter

Shortlisted, for sure.

Andy Psarianos

You're involved in so many things, because you also teach, right? That's the thing. You made a long list of stuff, but you also teach. So listen, Claire, what we'd be really interested in finding out about is, I know your school has a lot of experience, some speciality with visually impaired children, and obviously we're interested in mathematics education. And mathematics education, visualisation is such a big part of it, right? What does that look like? What do you do with visually impaired children? How do you help them learn maths?

Claire Craddock

Well, that's a massive question.

Andy Psarianos

I know it is.

Claire Craddock

So how it works here at World's End, all of the children who are blind or visually impaired are fully integrated into the mainstream. So there is a room at the bottom of the school where the teacher for the visually impaired, who looks after a team of teaching assistants who support the children in the mainstream classroom, so there's a little room where they do all their resourcing. They make things into braille, they enlarge print, they do lots of adaptations, but the children are taught within the classroom with all of the other children.

It could be that if the child has got a visual impairment that they have a monitor alongside, so when the teacher's writing on the whiteboard, it is on the monitor so that the children can see very clearly how the teachers are modelling, because modelling is something that's really, really important. If the child is completely blind, then the teaching assistants will have resources. So it'll be whatever the teacher's modelling, they will have some sort of concrete resource that mirrors that. It does mean that our teachers need to be really, really organised.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, sounds like it.

Claire Craddock

They have to get their planning into the VI team well in advance. I mean, they're brilliant. They can adapt things ever so quickly, but we do have to keep getting the resources to them and any assessments, they've got copies of the Maths — No Problem! already because they know that we'll be using that so that they can make the relevant adaptations.

Andy Psarianos

It sounds like a lot of work.

Claire Craddock

Yeah, I suppose we're so used to it. We don't think of it as additional work now, and as I said, we are really, really lucky that we've got this team of teaching assistants and teachers who just get on and do this. I'm yet to find a topic that they can't adapt. It's not even maths related, but even things like light and shadows in science, they manage to adapt with light detectors with little alarms and things like that. So absolutely everything can be done for the blind and the visually impaired children.

Robin Potter

So from a teaching perspective, how long does it take for a teacher to get up to speed in being able to work with these pupils?

Claire Craddock

The VI team do a lot of it for the teachers, so as long as the teacher's work is planned in advance, then they just do it. I have sent some photos over to your team, so maybe you could have a little look at those because you can see where the work has been adapted into braille or into... So things like bar models can be made with wiki sticks. These little sticky, look like sticky pipe cleaners, so that they can feel around the outside. Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Interesting.

Adam Gifford

It strikes me that sometimes when we talk about adjustments that have needed to be made for children, so sight impaired, maybe non-verbal, maybe deaf, all of these adjustments, whenever I talk to... Well, A, I just want to come and see your practitioners because it sounds awesome. But the second part that always strikes me is that it really sharpens up practise to what the important part is in that lesson. You can't get the representation wrong because there's such an emphasis to get that part right, because one of the senses isn't supporting that in the same way.

Have you found that in considering the adjustments that are being made, that it's just supported your teaching full stop, that it's supported practitioners full stop, to be very clear with their intent and purpose for lessons?

Claire Craddock

I think, yeah. I think so. And not just for the visually impaired children, but for all of the children with additional needs as you say. What's good for visually impaired children and for SEN children generally is great for all of the children. So things like representation and structure is good for all. So yeah, it has things like sentence stems and the lesson structure the way it is, with the peer talk, and back and... episodic teaching, all of those things support all of our learners. A lot of the good practise that we use in terms of Teaching for Mastery in maths has now rolled out into other subjects. And it is a lot of these strategies that support SEN children, but then actually support all of the children. So yeah, it has been really interesting the way that it's developed and filtered out into all subjects now.

Andy Psarianos

So what happens in instances of assessment when you're assessing, and maybe even doing things like SATs? What does that look like? How is it different?

Claire Craddock

So obviously the blind children will have braille, whatever standard of braille that they're at, so they will have specially adapted print. The low vision children will have... We are allowed to open the papers a little bit earlier, so that will give the VI team a chance to have a quick look through the paper to see, it might be that there's something around shape or a graph or something like that, that will need some sort of adaptation. Or they'll need to find a physical resource for the child to see what the question's really about. But it does mean very, very quick adaptations, but it can be done.

Andy Psarianos

Okay, but the expectations are the same?

Claire Craddock

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, the expectations are the same.

Andy Psarianos

Right.

Robin Potter

Do you have a lot of visually impaired children specifically coming to your school because you are well known?

Claire Craddock

We have the visually impaired resource base. So we are funded for these children to come and work with us. So they do come especially, they're such an important part of our school. I think working alongside children who are visually impaired really helps the other children in terms of empathy and in collaboration. It helps them, not even with the maths, it helps them to know to keep the classrooms tidy so that nobody trips up over things. It's all of these skills that come naturally. They're really, really important part of our school.

Andy Psarianos

That's interesting.

Adam Gifford

Can I ask something? Oh, sorry, you go ahead.

Andy Psarianos

Go ahead. No, you go, you go.

Adam Gifford

You go. You go. I know what I want...

Andy Psarianos

Okay. Okay. I know your question's going to be better than mine, so that's why I you to go first.

Adam Gifford

It's not.

Andy Psarianos

But anyway. Okay. I'll ask. Oh, geez, now I forgot what I was going to ask. Oh, no, I do remember. I do remember. So let's talk about the pupils. You said it makes them more empathetic. It makes them more aware. What about the other pupils in this environment? What do they get out of it? I could imagine that some parents... Well, some parents might be hesitant and say, "Well, I don't want to send my kid there because..." Does that ever happen?

Claire Craddock

Never.

Andy Psarianos

Never.

Claire Craddock

Never. I've never heard that happen at all. I think everyone, because they're just fully integrated, they're just a member of the class. So other than the fact that they have work that is adapted so that they can access it, there is no other change. Really important part of our school community.

Andy Psarianos

So maybe I didn't ask the question very well. I've heard parents don't always... They can be tricky, let's just put it that way. Every school has to deal with their parents, and parents obviously have concerns and sometimes very misguided understandings of what's going on. So I heard recently, and this is a person who's not in education, but just as a parent and has a child who's a bit troublesome at school and struggling. Anyway, she says things like... And I don't really call her on it's not my place, but she says things like, "Well, they're always worried about those special kids and my kid doesn't get any attention." I mean, you don't run into that?

Claire Craddock

Never. Never.

Andy Psarianos

So how do you manage the community then? Because I think that's my next question, because I think that's a key point here is that that relationship that you have with the community, what does your school do? How do you keep parents on board with everything that's going on in the school? It's not necessarily aimed at visually impaired, but just in general.

Claire Craddock

I think that if we branded parent workshops as a maths workshop, we get very poor uptake. The parents don't really want to engage with that so much. So what we've been doing is doing workshops where the children work alongside their parents on something, perhaps art based or DT based, and then at the end of the workshop go, "Did you realise that you've been doing all this maths?" So yeah, we get them in to do really fun, creative things, and then we pull the maths out of that afterwards and say, "Actually, you've done this maths and this maths," because I think sometimes the parents can be a little bit maths anxious. We are still battling sometimes with parents that say things like, "Oh, I was never any good at maths at school." Or, "The dad does all the maths." So the teachers here would be very quick to jump on comments like that and say, "That's not how we talk about maths in this school. That's not helpful to the children. We can all do maths and do you realise we're doing maths in this and this." But it is an ongoing process. It's something that we've just got to keep chipping away at.

Adam Gifford

What I was going to ask Claire, is that I'm usually a pretty... I don't get angry too often. I think I try to be reasonably calm and reasonable person, but there's a few things in education that get me really cross. One of them is around special needs. And when I hear educators saying, "We've got to do..." "Yes, but what do we do for our special needs children?" As if we have to approach these children totally differently and it makes me really cross because I listen to you, I listen to other people who work with children with some really significant special needs. But it strikes me that the approach that the principles, the theories that underpin learning, remain the same. Most importantly, the expectation remains the same that these kids can learn.

Am I justified in getting angry when people suggest that, "Yes, but what do I do with these children?" As if it's a totally different approach accepting these reasonable adjustments. But like you said, if you can't see something in small print, you make it bigger. I'm not trying to simplify it.

Claire Craddock

I completely agree.

Adam Gifford

I guess what I'm trying to say is are we using the same approach and do we have the same expectations for these children? Because I believe that we should, and it's not... What are your thoughts?

Claire Craddock

Yeah. I completely believe that we should. All children can learn maths and, as I said previously, the strategies that work well for children who have special learning needs are great for all children. So yeah, I think that we definitely... Certainly here we would not lower expectations. What really makes me cross is when schools are still ability grouping. We've learned a lot over the years about the damage that that can do and I am passionate that we are not going to put all the special needs children on a table to be spoon-fed by a teaching assistant. They can be working alongside their peers so that they can learn.

When we first went towards a Teaching for Mastery, mixed prior attainment approach, I thought it would be the lower attaining children that would struggle the most. I was really surprised. Those children really rose and they did really, really well. It was the previous high attaining children that found it the hardest, because all of a sudden an answer wasn't good enough. They have to explain it and justify it and prove it and represent it and show that they have a deep understanding, which quite often, they didn't have because they just know it. So it was those children that found it the hardest. I think the previous low attaining children have done really, really well. So yeah, I am also passionate about that.

Adam Gifford

Okay. Passionate is a better word than angry. I like that. I'll adjust my language. And there's one more thing, but I think this is a different podcast again, and I think this feeds into this. And I don't know again whether this resonates with you, but I find that when children, and there's funding, there's additional funding for that child, is that that can lead to someone feeling like they need to be actively involved with this child all the time. So, can you get some counters for me? Actually, I'll get them for you, as if I need to prove my job. And there's this feeling of worry that if I, or if someone else, says to that person, "Listen, just go and wander around the classroom. Just leave them to it and intervene when you need to," as if all of a sudden now... Does that justify it? I'm interested in, do you recognise that situation that I'm talking about?

Claire Craddock

I do. Under the old curriculum, that's something that we probably would have seen, but now, no. Not at all. One of the things that our VI TAs are really, really skilled at is developing independence with children. So they will work with a whole group of children, with the visually impaired children, in that group, rather than glue themselves to the side of the children. As I say, when we first went towards the Teaching for Mastery approach, that was a big battle. Get un-velcroing the TAs from their children was a bit of a battle.

But now, the role of the teacher and the TA has changed. Because we've got this episodic teaching, the TA no longer needs to be sat next to that child. The TA can be working with perhaps children that might be previous high attaining and are coasting a little bit, or children that are struggling with attention, with concentrating, rather than struggling with the cognitive load. Or the TA rollers, or they'll be modelling alongside, so in our lessons, we often see TAs writing on working walls or putting work on working walls or making notes in notebooks to support the teachers in knowing which children understand what, rather than sitting with a child just because they think that they should. But it's something that we have to continue to work out.

Adam Gifford

Warms my heart, hearing that Claire. I think it should be part and parcel of almost that funding model, that word independence sits in there as part of it, as part of, not just reasonable adjustments, but reasonable adjustments that lead to independent learning. Anyway, but thank you for that, thanks. I appreciate hearing what you do. It's really important.

Andy Psarianos

Thank you for joining us on the School of School podcast.