Perspectives on progress
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) guidelines 2001 state that there is a need to recognise different perspectives on progression for pupils whose special needs mean that they will progress very slowly throughout their whole school career and may still be working towards level one even during their Secondary or Post 16 years. The guidelines discuss three aspects of progress:
- Vertical progress – is the characteristic nature of progress described in national curriculum programmes of study i.e. climbing the ladder of knowledge, as pupils successively develop more complex skills and conceptual understanding. It is typical of what we think of as measurable steps.
- Lateral progression - Is important to us all but often taken for granted. It relates to widening and consolidating knowledge and skills. Through experience pupils extend their abilities by generalising connecting and combining skills and concepts, developing abilities to see relationships apply them to different circumstances etcetera. Because it relates to generating a web of connections it is not easy to prescribe the order of learning and as such is more difficult to prescribe levels to create units of measurement.
- The Maintenance of abilities – is an important focus for teachers working with very special children who may have complex temporary difficulties or medical conditions that may lead to deterioration. Under such circumstances sustaining their functional and social abilities are an important contribution to maintaining the quality of their lives.
A Great Challenge Pupils who face very significant barriers to learning cannot be expected to climb the vertical ladder of progress at the same rate as their more typical peers. They need opportunities to consolidate the knowledge and skills that they learn through experience of applying their learning in different contexts. For this reason lateral progression is an important element of their progress and often represents great achievement which should be celebrated, and yet it is not shown in assessment data. P scales are generally by their nature vertical and data drawn from them fails to reflect the progress of children who progress very slowly. However they are written as broad descriptions containing a number of elements rather than specific objectives, QCA guidelines suggest they should be used as a framework for best fit judgements incorporating professional knowledge of the learner, circumstances etc. As such they can give us a framework on which to view not only the levels through which individual pupil’s progress but also progress within levels. The current situation offers special needs practitioners a challenge and an opportunity. Whilst data derived from the eight P levels is inadequate to represent detail of progress pupils make reporting on the extent of our pupils’ lateral progression within levels will give us the opportunity to illustrate the breadth of their learning and achievement. Many special schools have well developed systems for illustrating positive developments of their children to parents. What does your school do to ensure that information about how much children have progressed by widening, consolidating and applying learning illustrates the extent of their achievements when data about vertical progress is inadequate to do so.
