Read about my trip to Canada with the Education Select Committee

Last week, I joined a study trip organised by parliament’s Education Select Committee to Ontario, Canada, to learn about their SEND provision.

We visited several schools and heard from teachers, school leaders, and SEND specialists, and spent time chatting with lots of pupils of different ages.

We also met Ontario’s new Education Minister Paul Calandra as well as a couple of MPs, officials from the Education Ministry, the British Consul General Fouzia Younis MBE, and Lieutenant General Edith Dumont, the King’s representative in Ontario and a lifelong educator.

It was a packaged agenda, and enlightening to see how a different approach to SEND education delivers incredible results. Here are some quotes from various leaders at the Peel District School Board, who showed us around West Credit Secondary School in Mississauga, that have stayed with me:

·      “Our approach is grounded in the belief that all students deserve access to high quality learning, and experience meaningful outcomes and pathways that respect their strengths, needs and aspirations.

·      “Our programme strives to dismantle ableism and other systemic barriers. 

·      “We don’t just accommodate children - we actively design environments that reduce the need for accommodations. We not only meet, but exceed the expectations of our community by providing services that are adaptive, responsive and forward thinking. 

·      “Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of a thriving community.”

In Canada, they believe in a system where schools and teachers work hand in hand to get the best outcomes for all children – there’s very little of the battling we see here from parents to get provision for their children.

Listening is at the foundation of this system, and behaviour, fundamentally, is seen as a way of communicating, with teachers and TA’s taught how to recognise and interpret behaviour.

The focus is on ability, not diagnosis; so, they start from the question, ‘what is this child capable of’ and work from there to develop their strengths. As a result, integration is heavily promoted, so SEND pupils are included wherever possible with mainstream classes.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and this is just a glimpse of what we saw and hear.

The Committee will use our learning from the visit to feed into the SEND enquiry that we are currently running, and it would be great if we could carry through some of the examples we’ve seen into ideas about how we can improve the SEND system here in England.