I learned this job backwards, and I think that is the only reason I understand it at all.
When I was nineteen I got sent on a week of work experience to a school in Cardiff. Nobody had told me it was a school for children with moderate to severe learning difficulties. I worked that out somewhere around the second lesson, which tells you how carefully I had read the paperwork. I had never worked in a school. I had no particular plan to.
I went for one day and then asked if I could come back.
What I ended up doing for the next stretch of my life was designing and making learning resources for children with SEND who were placed in mainstream schools, and eventually working as a TA. That was the job. Somebody would tell me a Year 5 boy could not access the history unit, and I would go and find out why, and then make the thing that got him in.
Almost none of the reasons were the ones written on his paperwork.
The reason was that the text had four subordinate clauses before it got to the point. The reason was that the task asked him to hold three numbers in his head while doing a fourth thing with his hands. The reason was that the instruction had five steps in it and the teacher said it once, at speed, over the sound of thirty children getting their books out.
I did that for years before anyone taught me a word of theory about it. So I came to teaching with the wrong thing in my head first. I did not learn to teach a class and then learn to adapt it. I learned to take a task apart and find the bit that was stopping one particular child, and only afterwards did somebody hand me thirty children and a curriculum and a degree in primary education.
That order matters, and it is most of what I want to say.
Nobody's paperwork ever said "this text is badly written"
The habit I picked up at nineteen, entirely by accident, was to look at the task rather than the child.
I was not being enlightened about it. I was being practical. I could not change the boy. He was going to arrive on Tuesday exactly as he was. The only thing in the room I had any control over was the material, so that is where I went looking, and it turned out that most of the time the material was where the problem lived.
The research got there considerably before I did. What the EEF ended up calling the five-a-day in its guidance on SEND in mainstream schools is not a special programme: explicit instruction, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, scaffolding, flexible grouping, sensible use of technology. Read that list. It is not a SEND list, it is a description of teaching. The guidance is polite about it, but the implication is fairly blunt. If your provision for children with SEND looks like a different activity happening at a different table, the problem might not be the children.
Then there is the DISS project and everything Rob Webster and Peter Blatchford did after it, which found that the pupils receiving the most teaching assistant support were making less progress than comparable pupils receiving less of it. Not because teaching assistants are bad at the job. I was one. Because of how schools had arranged us. We had built an arrangement in which the children with the greatest need reliably got the least contact with the most expert adult in the building, and we had done it while feeling quite good about how much support we were providing.
When I first read that I did not have a crisis about it. I read it and thought, yes, that was my job description. I had spent years being the reason a child sat at a different table.
The years that made me confident, and the year that took it back off me
After I qualified I ran a provision in inner-city Bristol for young people who were not in education, employment or training. Functional skills and life skills, mostly. We were oversubscribed, which is a peculiar thing to be able to say about a place that only exists because the school system has already not worked for everyone in it.
You learn quickly there that exclusion is not an event. By the time somebody arrives at sixteen with nothing, you can usually find, if you ask them, the point at about age eight where the work stopped making sense and nobody noticed. They often remember the year. Sometimes they remember the teacher's name.
Then I went to Egypt, and that is where I actually learned to teach primary. I worked my way up and down the year groups, got seriously interested in thinking and metacognition, and ended up leading teaching and learning. I ran accreditation cycles with BSO, with CIS, with BSME. I introduced initiatives. Some of them even worked.
By any external measure I was doing well. I came back to the UK reasonably confident that I knew what I was doing.
I took a job as instructional coaching lead in a trust that runs its schools as community hubs in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country, with inclusion and a set of character habits sitting at the centre of everything rather than in a policy folder. It is a serious organisation with a serious ethos and I learned more there in a year than in several before it.
I also came very close to going under.
What went wrong, precisely
There is a way of telling this that is false modesty and a way that makes me sound as though I should not have been in a classroom, and neither is true, so let me be exact.
I was not a bad teacher. I was a competent teacher running a model that did not fit the situation, and it took me too long to work out which part of it was wrong.
In an international setting the spread of need in a class is real, but it is narrower and it is far more predictable. You plan for it and the plan mostly survives contact. My entire system was built on that. I was good at anticipating. I had the adaptation designed in before the lesson started and I was quietly rather proud of it.
Then I was standing in front of classes where the range in one room was wider than anything I had planned for, where the thing that derailed a lesson was frequently not academic at all, and where a decision I had made on Sunday about a child could be irrelevant by twenty past nine on Monday because of something that had happened at home on Saturday.
My planning was excellent. My planning was also, several times a week, useless by the middle of the first lesson.
And I was doing this while coaching other people on responsive teaching. There is a particular flavour of discomfort in sitting at the back of a colleague's room writing an approving note about how she picked up a misconception in the moment, when your own morning had consisted of delivering a well-made plan at children who had stopped following twenty minutes earlier.
I got better. That took a lot of help from people who had spent their whole careers in those schools and were generous with it. But I got close enough to the edge to be clear about what the actual error was, and it is the thing this whole piece is about.
I had been treating adaptation as something you do to a lesson beforehand. It is something you do inside a lesson, while it is happening.
That is the real difference between what most of us were trained to call differentiation and what the Core Content Framework now calls adaptive teaching. It is not a rebrand and it is not semantics. One is a prediction about children you have imagined. The other is a response to the children who turned up. I was very good at the first one and it was not enough.
What that turned into
I did not start building software because I had a clever idea. I built it because I had a specific and slightly embarrassing problem: I knew what good practice looked like, I could describe it to other teachers convincingly enough to be paid for doing so, and I still could not hold all of it myself, every lesson, in week nine of a long term.
That gap is the whole thing. Not knowledge. Nobody in British education is short of knowledge about this. Sustaining it under real conditions is where it comes apart, and it comes apart for good teachers, which is a far more uncomfortable finding than the alternative.
So some things are built in rather than optional.
Every lesson carries what could stop a child in it, named as a barrier rather than as a category of child, on every step rather than in a box at the bottom. That is essentially my nineteen-year-old self's job description turned into part of the structure. It is there whether or not anyone in the class has a diagnosis, because it will be useful either way.
There is one task with ways into it, rather than three tasks with a hierarchy. If there are levels, and there should be, they live in the teacher's notes. They do not go on the child's paper. Anyone who believes children cannot read a room has never been a teaching assistant.
Challenge is offered to everybody and allocated to nobody. The moment you hand the harder question to a named group you have rebuilt the old arrangement with better manners.
And the plan carries in-the-moment moves, because that is the part I was missing. If you see this, try this. If a child is stuck here, this is the way back in. If a child has finished, this is where to push. It is the part of teaching that never fitted on a planning proforma and it is the part that decides how the lesson actually goes.
Two things for anyone reading this sceptically
The first is that adaptive teaching can very easily become differentiation with a new label on the front. If the three worksheets survive and only the policy wording changes, nothing has happened except another twilight session. The test I use is not about paperwork. Ask a child in the room which group they are in. If they can tell you, it has not changed.
The second is that none of it is free. Finding the barrier in a task is harder than printing an easier version of it, and it costs subject knowledge and thinking time, which is the resource schools have least of. I am not going to pretend otherwise, having spent a year finding out exactly how expensive it is to get wrong.
But it is the right cost, and it was never really about the children on the register. It was always about the design of the thing we were asking all of them to do.
Sources for this piece are listed in the SEQUENS evidence register, published in full so you can check it.