Care is not the word for it

Third class, a wet Tuesday, the middle of a maths lesson. Twenty-six children, one teacher, one special needs assistant.

Watch her for forty minutes.

She stands at the back while the teacher gives out the task, and the moment the teacher finishes she moves — not to one child, but along a row. As she goes she says the same instruction again in eight words instead of thirty. She turns a page that was open at the wrong side. She sees a boy who has stopped writing and is looking out the window, and she does not ask him if he is stuck, because she knows that question gets a no; she puts a finger on the next line instead and keeps walking. She lifts a copybook off the edge of a desk before an elbow sweeps it onto the floor.

Then she clocks that the girl by the radiator has started rocking her chair, which is about four minutes earlier than what usually comes next. She catches the teacher's eye. The two of them do the thing they do — the thing nobody has ever written down — and the girl is sent to the office with a message and comes back, and the four minutes never happen.

She also knows something nobody else in the building knows, which is that the boy at the top of the room can do this maths, and cannot do this maths and the hall doors banging at the same time.

None of that is care.

What the paper says

The scheme she is employed under describes her work in terms of a child's significant care needs. That is the language in the circulars. It is the language on the form the school fills in, and it is the category the allocation gets counted in. Care, in that language, means roughly: mobility, toileting, eating, medical need, the physical business of getting safely through a school day.

Plenty of SNAs do exactly that, every day. It is skilled, it is intimate, and I am not diminishing a minute of it.

But it is not a description of the forty minutes above.

Those forty minutes are an instruction being re-delivered in a form the child can hold. Working memory being propped up. A task cut into pieces. A transition managed and a dysregulation intercepted before it arrives. It is, in plain terms, access to the curriculum — which is the one thing the scheme says explicitly the role is not for.

On paper she is there for care. In practice she is the access plan.

Nobody meant this

Care was the box that existed.

When we began putting children into mainstream classrooms in real numbers, we needed something to send in with them, and what we had to hand was a care post. So we sent a care post. And then we asked it — quietly, never out loud, never in writing — to do the design work the system had not done. The NCSE's own comprehensive review of the scheme said something close to this years ago and recommended a different model. The scheme is still, in most schools, the one we have.

Nobody chose this. The principal did not invent the category. The teacher did not write the job description; she inherited a second adult and no time to plan with her. The SNA did not apply for the job she is actually doing — she started doing it in the second week, because the child in front of her needed it and she was the one standing there.

What it costs, and who pays

Her. She does the most relational work in the building with the least say over it. She is rarely in the room when the lesson is planned, because there is no moment in the week when she is free and the teacher is free at the same time. She is very often the first person in the school to know that something has changed for that child — before the teacher, before me at home, long before any report — and there is frequently no formal route by which anyone asks her. Then September comes, the allocation is reviewed, the school juggles what it has, and her hours may land with a different child in a different room. The hours move. What she knows about that child does not move with them. It stays in her head, and her head is now on the other side of the building.

The teacher. A second adult in the room is an enormous thing to have — if you can plan with her. Mostly you cannot, so you end up directing in real time, which is the hardest and least effective way to use another professional. There is a second cost, subtler and worse: her presence makes it look as though the access problem has been solved. If the child is getting through the lesson, the lesson does not get redesigned. The adult standing beside him becomes the reason nobody ever asks why he needs somebody standing beside him.

Him. This is the real trouble with delivering access as a person rather than as a design: access acquires a face. When the face is out sick, or moved in September, access is not reduced — it is gone. And it is visible. In a room of twenty-six, being the child with an adult beside you is a status, and it is not a neutral one. By eight or nine, a great many children begin declining the support they need rather than be that child. We then write that down as the child refusing support, which is one of the more unfair sentences we commit to paper.

His mother. To secure the allocation at all, she has to make her son sound like a child with care needs, because care is the vocabulary the form accepts. She writes the worst week of last year onto a page and calls it a normal week, because a normal week will not meet the threshold. She uses words about her own child that she does not believe. Then she comes to the parent–teacher meeting and is told he is doing really well — which is true, and which is true because of the forty minutes, and there is no line on any form where that sentence fits.

What a designed version looks like

Almost none of this needs money. It needs the job to be described accurately and then treated as a job.

Write it down as it actually is. A school cannot rewrite a circular. It can write one honest page — what this SNA actually does with this class, in order, on a normal day — and hand it to the next person. Half the knowledge in a school is undocumented because we never gave it a document.

Five timetabled minutes before the lesson, not thirty seconds in the corridor after it. A resource you cannot plan with is not a resource. It is a person standing beside you.

Ask her. She holds the earliest data in the building. Put her in the room when the child is discussed, and treat what she says as evidence rather than as impression.

Hand over in June. If the hours are going to move in September, the knowledge has to move too, and an hour in June is the cheapest hour the school will spend all year.

Design the lesson so that less of her day is repair. The instruction given twice, in writing as well as aloud, left on the board where it stays — that is one re-delivery she does not have to make. Not so that she is needed less. So that she is freed up for the work only a person can do.

And one honest limit, because this argument gets misused. Better design does not mean fewer SNAs, and anyone reading it that way is reading it wrong. Good design does not toilet a child, does not sit with him in the corridor at the worst ten minutes of his week, does not notice the chair rocking four minutes early. The allocation is not the problem. The mis-description is the problem — and a role we have never accurately named is a role we can neither train for, plan around, nor protect.

We wrote care on the form because care was the box that existed.

It was never the name for what she does all day.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.