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.
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