Education & Advocacy
Why Your Child or Student’s IEP Might Be Useless
Expert advice for developing effective student support plans
Effective Student Support Planning
Individual Education Plans are now called Student-Specific Plans in Manitoba. SSPs are written documents developed and implemented by a team, outlining a plan to address the individual learning needs of students.
Building upon my previous article, Manitoba’s SSP Handbook Needs An Upgrade, I want to outline some practical ways that these documents can serve their true purpose:
- Student Plans should inform school staff about a student’s needs, strengths, accommodations, and the best ways to support them.
- SSPs should be strengths-based, written in a way that utilizes the student’s strengths to help develop their areas of struggle, and that puts the onus on the school and the adults to provide appropriate supports and accommodations.
- As students grow, the responsibility should gradually be transferred to the youth, with the help and guidance of caring adults. The skills being developed should be scaffolded, and this process should include instruction on self-advocacy, so that the student is able to advocate for their own needs and accommodations in the future.
- Planning documents must honour the student as an individual, acknowledge their unique gifts, and seek to emphasize their strengths.
- SSPs should clearly outline these supports, accommodations, and best practices in a way that is easy for school staff to understand and follow.\
Therein lies the rub
This last point is where a lot of IEPs, SSPs, assessments, and other planning documents fall short. They may contain fantastic information and great recommendations, but if they are full of professional jargon or have unrealistic recommendations that the school doesn’t have the resources to follow, then they won’t be very useful to the student (or to anyone).
As I mentioned in my previous article, it is the obligation of the school administration to advocate for their students and to push for the resources they need in order to provide appropriate support and accommodations.
That said, these processes take time. Children are too often the ones left floundering while we impatiently wait for the powers that be to put their seal of approval on whatever bureaucratic hoops they make us jump through.
It’s usually the classroom teacher and their students who are left to try to work together with only partial resources available to them, and that isn’t fair to anyone.
Staff support and training
An important part of providing resources is ensuring that staff has adequate qualifications, skills, training, and support in order to meet the needs of the students.
What I’ve found is that quite often school staff have a meeting, review, and update the student’s plan, then that document is filed away in a drawer to gather dust while everyone fumbles along doing the best they can without proper guidance.
School staff need in-the-moment guidance along the lines of, when this happens, here is what you do. Student plans and assessment reports may be too general for the staff to make use of them if they don’t know how to handle specific scenarios in the moment.
When we are in an emotional situation — which absolutely will happen if a child is dysregulated — we fall back on instincts and old ways of behaving. If school staff are going to practice new approaches with students, and implement new skills in real-time, then they need extensive and long-term training. Just like students, adults need opportunities to practice newly learned skills with the guidance of a mentor in order for new behaviours to become habits.
Have I Mentioned… Resources?
Again, this comes down to the Manitoba Government providing adequate funding that is specifically earmarked for these types of supports and training.
Schools need:
- Proper funding so as to recruit, hire, train, and retain qualified, experienced, and skilled staff.
- Proper funding so as to have the time and finances to pay staff to attend or receive additional and ongoing relevant training.
- The mandate that administrators must provide the time, coverage, and support for staff to attend relevant training opportunities.
- Most importantly, opportunities for clinical teams and experts to provide on-the-job guidance, mentorship, and training for school staff.
I cannot stress this enough:
An hour or two of on-the-job training is much more worthwhile than 8 hours of sitting at a workshop and retaining maybe 40% of what we hear. (Mure & Dros, 2015)
If administrators can spare the time and expense of just one hour each week (or more if they can!) of on-the-job training for their staff, they will reap the benefits in spades. And, really, how many meetings that could have been emails do we pay staff to attend every year? I am sure we can spare an hour or two for practical mentorship and guidance in the name of better supporting our students.
Staff will feel empowered when they are given the proper tools to do their jobs, rather than being thrown in unprepared and then held accountable (dare I say, blamed?) when things go wrong.
Most importantly, the students will reap the benefits of competent, confident, and compassionate support staff in their schools and classrooms. It is often the students who shoulder most of the blame and suffer the consequences when things go wrong, leading to poorer academic outcomes and lower self-worth.
Practical and realistic solutions
The next time you’re sitting in a school meeting and everyone around the table feels satisfied that you’ve come up with wonderful goals, accommodations, and recommendations, take a pause. Before you put the proverbial rubber stamp on that SSP, ask one very important question:
Practically speaking, what will this look like in the day-to-day life of the school staff and the student? How exactly, and very specifically, will we be implementing these accommodations and recommendations?
Go through the student’s day step-by-step if you have to, outlining exactly where the struggles come up, and what the adults can do moment-to-moment to help that student develop the skills they need to manage, workaround, and overcome these difficulties.
Practically speaking, what will this look like in the day-to-day life of the school staff and the student? How exactly, and very specifically, will we be implementing these accommodations and recommendations?
For more information on writing effective SSPs, please see my previous article.
Focus on What Truly Matters
At the end of the day, the student’s needs must come first. Each student has the right to accommodations that put them on a level playing field with their peers.
The goal of an SSP, or any planning for a student, must be to make the student’s school life easier and to support them to be successful. The goal is not to make the adult’s lives easier, but when we provide the right supports for the student and adequate training for staff, the two will come hand-in-hand.
A student’s plan should never be written from a behaviourist perspective, trying to use punishment and rewards to “train” the student to behave the way they want.
As mentioned in the introduction, any student planning must truly honour the child or youth as an individual, acknowledge their unique gifts, and seek to emphasize their strengths. This is a human being discussed and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.
© Jillian Enright, Neurodiversity MB
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References
Murre JMJ, Dros J (2015) Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve. PLOS ONE 10(7): e0120644. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0120644
