Association of School and College Leaders

We have to find ways of providing the appropriate level of SEND education in circumstances where, year on year, the number of kids being certified as requiring SEND support is growing each and every year, and that's the job that Lucy's looking at right now.

Pepe de Lazio is a former headteacher, now General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, regularly helps us with education matters.

Good to see you again, Pepe.

The numbers don't add up here, do they, sir? Good morning.

Let's talk more when that comes out.

As ever, thanks for your time, Pepe.

Pepe D'Alessio is a former headteacher himself, now General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.

Gabby, coming to you as a first caller.

I really hope not.

ASCL has over 150 years in its history and we have never taken strike action.

So we don't do this lightly.

And I really hope that we don't even have to ballot for potential strike action.

Give us a like, give us a share, pop in a question, any comments you've got.

We're going to start by talking about this story that's been making rounds this week about the ASCL, the Association for School and College Leaders, who have been talking about Ofsted.

Ofsted.

And they have basically said this week that negotiations are exhausted.

Negotiation.

Quote, negotiation has been exhausted and more assertive action is required.

And the ASCL will discuss next steps.

Now...

Hello, colleagues, and welcome to another ASCL Policy Snapshot.

My name's Catherine Morgan, and I'm the Leadership and Workforce Policy Specialist at ASCL, and I'm delighted to be joined by Alex Quigley, former teacher, former employer at the EEF, well-known author, and working as a consultant internationally and nationally with schools.

Now, I'm sure many of you on the call will be very familiar with Alex's work.

Um, I, in particular, was really struck by a recent post that Alex shared on literacy as an inclusion strategy, and thought it'd be a really good opportunity to dig into some of the, uh, detail in Alex's blog, and also his up-and-coming book.

So great to have you with me, Alex.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So as I've just said, um, you wrote a really fantastic, um, blog that you shared at the beginning of this week, and I thought it would be a great opportunity for ASCL members to learn a little bit more about some of your, um, key thinking within that post.

So I'd like us to start off by thinking, um, about the argument that you make, that literacy isn't just an addition to inclusive practice, but it's actually a large part of what inclusive practice is.

Maybe in future we can get Sir Martin Oliver to come and answer some of these questions directly, as I think it would be really useful to understand what they're doing about it.

I think they are aware of this, actually, and we're not getting the kinds of messages sometimes in the past that we've had from Ofsted of, we're not interested, but it sounds like on behalf of ASCL and all unions, you would like some action, not just like we're listening, but what we're actually going to do about it.

So that would be a helpful thing for us to get in the future.

Right, that's it for this week on education, actually.