Edssential article from @andrewwarnerkms :
This year I have been trying to use a common sense approach to challenge and differentiation. Rather than slavishly accept the doctrine to dumb down my resources and make the language of explanations “accessible” (read “easy”), I’ve ensured that my students have been given deliberately difficult language and concepts to deal with, and given them the time and support to understand them. As you might expect, this takes a little longer when you’re dealing with a “low ability” set full of kids who all have SEN statements that label them as failures and strugglers in one form or another. This week my Set 5 SEN group sat the most difficult controlled assessment they will have to do, comparing a Shakespeare play to a range of poems. Where we previously would teach them the Shakespeare, write part of the controlled assessment, teach the poetry and then write another bit of the controlled