Book Review: Big Inclusive SEND Careers Handbook by Jenny Connick

Last week saw the publication of the Support for children and young people with special educational needs report from the UK government’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC). The findings of the report are stark: “The system to support children and young people with special educational needs (SEN) in England is reaching, or, arguably, has already reached, crisis point.”

Against this backdrop, receiving a copy of Jenny Connick’s Big Inclusive SEND Careers Handbook to review made for timely reading. The book is written for an England-based audience, but the story is the same everywhere: when it comes to supporting children, young people and adults with additional needs, systems are overstretched and under-resourced.

Policy and practice that doesn’t fully meet the needs of the individual? Long waiting times for diagnosis? Repeated attempts before needs are acknowledged? A relentless cycle of paperwork? Being unsure if your client is located in the right system, at the right time and with the right label attached to their case file? The PAC report describes a “chaotic and adversarial system” in England but for those working in other nations the picture will be distressingly familiar.

Jenny Connick FRSA begins with an overview of the structural barriers for young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and the limitations of broad definitions and legal protections. For disadvantaged individuals, equality legislation is only part of the picture. The title of the book includes the SEND acronym, but the focus is on wider inclusion; the protected and unprotected characteristics that indicate disadvantage and inequity in its multifarious forms. (I can't let my readers down, so here’s my obligatory mention of how I would always like to see more on gender and occupational segregation in any text about social disadvantage.)

We are getting better at identifying needs, but are we meeting them? Connick reminds us to look out for missed opportunities, and to continue as a career development profession to focus on needs-based practice rather than as directed by paperwork and protocol. The suggestions for practice are tangible and actionable. This is helpful as equality, diversity and inclusion concepts can feel abstract when it comes to implementation.

I strongly recommended this book as core reading for anyone entering the sector in England as a careers leader, careers adviser or allied role. After presenting the policy and context in England, the book moves into a review of practice, the principles of which can be interpreted for other locations. This text will be particularly useful for parents, teachers and advisers working with those moving to England from other nations, who will be in dire need of a practical guide to what will feel like an impenetrable landscape of new terms, phrases and acronyms.

A follow up book tailored to understanding additional needs and inclusion in the education, training and skills landscapes of other UK nations and beyond would be welcome. We need to look outward where we can when seeking best practice, take learning from elsewhere and apply it. We also need to be able, as careers professionals, to prepare our clients for moves across the UK nations (and beyond, as global migrants for education and work), where the complex systems of SEND/Additional Support Needs (ASN) have differences that may require a comprehensive re-learning of policy and practice.

The question is, what comes next? We focus on the first career destinations of young people but collectively, individuals with SEND are know to move into a lifetime of underemployment. Even if we give people the best start, the next step is how we ensure people sustain and succeed in work and manage their own wellbeing.

Adults lack equitable, affordable access to lifelong career advice and may not see career information, advice and guidance (CIAG) as being something that’s relevant or available to them post formal education. This is something we need to address as a profession. It’s great to see a guest contribution in this book from Associate Professor Deirdre Hughes OBE, in relation to the value AI-driven technology may bring in this regard and how she led the development of CareerChat UK as an inclusive, accessible lifelong career tool (for more on CICI, the AI careers chatbot, go to: https://cicichat.co.uk/).

We’ve a way to go, but it’s great to see texts like the Big Inclusive SEND Careers Handbook available to help the careers community to continue to think broadly, innovatively and pragmatically about how to address inequality.

 

Book Cover of Big Inclusive SEND Careers Handbook


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why would someone choose to be a careers adviser?

Exploring the relationship between guidance practice and self-care

Veilederforum, Guest Editor