Adaptive teaching and reasonable adjustments should always be the starting point for supporting pupils with SEND. Every teacher should be adapting their teaching, and best practice teaching benefits all learners. But somewhere along the way, we’ve created a serious misconception in education: that if a student isn’t making progress, the answer is simply to add another reasonable adjustment.
I’ve started calling this ‘tier one stacking’.
It’s something I’m hearing about from schools across the country, and it seems to be becoming increasingly common as budgets tighten and the number of students with complex SEND continues to rise.
On paper, every individual reasonable adjustment makes perfect sense. Use visual supports. Chunk instructions. Provide movement breaks. Reduce cognitive load. Allow processing time. Use alternative recording methods. Offer pre-teaching. Provide a now and next board. None of these are unreasonable. In fact, they’re all examples of good practice.
The problem isn’t the individual adjustments.
The problem is what happens when we keep adding them without recognising that some pupils have needs that cannot be met through tier one provision alone.
Imagine one child needs five carefully planned reasonable adjustments. Then another child needs five different ones. A third child needs another five, with only some overlap – oh wait, you don’t need to imagine. This is your daily classroom reality if you are a teacher reading this. Suddenly the class teacher isn’t simply delivering adaptive teaching; they’re trying to remember and implement dozens of individual strategies, while simultaneously teaching the curriculum, managing behaviour, assessing learning, supporting emotional wellbeing and keeping thirty children engaged.
Every additional adjustment sounds small in isolation. Together, they create an enormous amount of planning, mental load and split-second decision making throughout every lesson. This is where the disconnect often appears.
In many schools, pupil progress meetings end with the message, “Try a few more reasonable adjustments.” Staff raise concerns that a child still isn’t accessing learning, and they’re told to adapt a little more. Differentiate a little further. Add another strategy. Sometimes that advice is absolutely appropriate. Not every pupil needs targeted intervention, and there are certainly occasions where classroom practice can be strengthened. But there also comes a point where we have to acknowledge that some children have needs which simply cannot be resolved by adding more tier one strategies.
Some pupils need targeted interventions.
Some need specialist teaching.
Some require involvement from external professionals.
Some need significantly more adult support.
Some need provision that goes beyond what a mainstream classroom can reasonably provide.
No amount of visual timetables, scaffolds or differentiated worksheets will remove a significant language disorder, severe emotional dysregulation or complex communication needs. Those strategies remain important, but they cannot replace specialist provision where it is genuinely required.
Of course, none of this is helped by the current financial reality facing schools.
Many senior leaders aren’t choosing tier one stacking because they believe it’s best practice. They’re choosing it because there is no funding available for additional staff, intervention teachers or specialist support. There simply isn’t anywhere else for the child to go. At the same time, teachers are left feeling increasingly overwhelmed. From their perspective, they’re constantly being asked to do more with the same amount of time, the same number of adults and the same classroom.
It’s also important to remember that remaining in tier one indefinitely doesn’t actually help schools in the longer term. If a student is likely to require an Education, Health and Care Needs Assessment, evidence of targeted and specialist provision will almost certainly be needed. Schools need to demonstrate the graduated approach, showing not only high-quality universal provision but also what has been tried at tier two, such as reading and maths interventions and, where appropriate, tier three, such as an occupational therapist.
That evidence forms part of the picture when demonstrating that a child’s needs cannot reasonably be met through ordinarily available provision. Ironically, by delaying movement beyond tier one, schools can end up delaying the very evidence needed to access additional support. When I’ve supported schools in difficulty, this issue can be glaringly obvious. Children who should have had EHCNAs applied for years ago, with little actual evidence of needs over and above general classroom practice. In these instances, I have seen children, even in primary school set up to fail. Tier two and three provision was not implemented soon enough, SEMH and behaviour needs escalated and the students were heading towards exclusion, with me having to cobble together scraps of evidence to prove that an EHCP was needed. I often joke that EHCPs get awarded by the weight of the folder (or the size of the digital files these days). I think there may be some truth in my joke somewhere.
This isn’t about criticising teachers or senior leaders. Everyone is working within an incredibly difficult system. Senior leaders are balancing impossible budgets. Teachers are managing increasingly diverse classrooms. SENDCos are trying to support everyone while navigating lengthy task lists and shrinking external services.
The problem is the system itself. Somewhere along the line, we’ve started confusing more tier one with better SEND provision. They’re not the same thing.
High-quality, best practice teaching will always be the foundation of inclusive practice, but foundations are only designed to carry so much weight. If every time a child struggles we simply add another reasonable adjustment, eventually the system becomes unsustainable – not because teachers lack skill or commitment, but because there is a limit to what one person can realistically deliver within a busy classroom.
Perhaps it’s time we stopped asking, “What other reasonable adjustment could we add?” and started asking a different question:
Have we reached the point where this child needs something more than tier one can realistically provide?
Recognising that point isn’t a failure of inclusion. It’s often the first step towards getting a child the support they genuinely need. I have recently been working with a company called Early Signals by Learnella, which supports a student’s journey from early intervention to SEND register and beyond. This human led AI tool is designed to cut through the bureaucracy and support issues like this by ensuring a clear trail of what has been tried and suitable ideas for next steps. Currently (Sept 26), Learnella is looking for more pilot schools. It honestly will save me hours of SENCo time a week once I’ve implemented it my schools – especially as I have helped develop it!
So if you have a significant number of tier one plates spinning for various children in your classrooms, it would be a good time to ask senior leaders at your school what the next step is. No one teacher has enough brain capacity for six or more students, all with five or more different tier one support mechanisms. Tier one has it’s place, but it was never designed to be in place of the tier two or higher interventions that individual children need to build the foundations to their attainment and mental health more effectively.
