In this episode, Grant sits down with Caroline Parker, head teacher at Gloucester Road Primary School, a one-form entry primary school in Cheltenham, to talk about one of the hottest topics in education right now: how schools can rebuild their SEN provision to actually meet the needs of every child.
Watch the full episode here
Gloucester Road isn't a typical Cheltenham school. Despite the area's reputation for affluence, the school has 48% of pupils speaking English as an additional language (29 different first languages), 37% of pupils with special needs, and 26% on pupil premium. Caroline's own path to headship ran through the special needs world from the start, beginning as a teaching assistant in a special school, then SENCO, then Assistant Head, before becoming head teacher in 2022. That grounding, she says, shaped everything about how she now leads.
The wake-up call
When Caroline stepped into headship, she started visiting classrooms with fresh eyes, and didn't like everything she saw. Key Stage Two data needed work, early years phonics had room to grow, and around eight pupils weren't accessing learning at all. They were roaming corridors, climbing trees, and driving a wave of behavioural incidents: 21 suspensions in a single year.
When she asked SEN pupils about their learning, she was often met with blank stares. One child told her plainly that he didn't need to listen, because eventually an adult would come and give him the answer. Books told a similar story: beautifully presented work, with labelled diagrams and neat pages, that masked pupils who couldn't actually explain what they'd "learned."
One moment summed it up for her. During a lesson on How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth, a pupil with SEN was asked to write instructions for washing one. He wrote: "You can't, they're extinct." He wasn't wrong. He just needed something the curriculum treadmill wasn't giving him: time to properly learn to read and write before being expected to access everything else alongside his peers.
Building the pathways
Caroline's response was to stop trying to fit every child into one model and instead build several. Gloucester Road now runs three pathways:
- Flourish – for pupils with complex needs often linked to autism, sensory processing, or trauma.
- Elevate – split across two classes, supporting pupils who need either a stronger staffing ratio for core subjects or highly bespoke, one-to-one style teaching for cognitive needs.
- Empower – the mainstream pathway most schools would recognise, refined with better environments and technology to reduce cognitive load.
It started small: a single support base for the eight children who'd been struggling most visibly. But a year in, Caroline began questioning why only the loudest needs were being met. What about the quieter children who weren't thriving either, just not disruptively? That question led to the pathways being born properly, with two further classes opening.
Every class across the school, pathway or mainstream, is named after a national animal from one of the countries represented in the school's EAL population, a small but deliberate choice to make every group feel like it belongs, not like an offshoot.
Stage, not age
The guiding principle behind it all is simple to say and harder to do: group children by their stage of learning, not their date of birth. Caroline points to Ken Robinson's well-known observation that age-based grouping is a leftover of the Industrial Revolution, and asks why schools are still built around it.
In practice, that means:
- Assessment-led decisions, using tools like YARC for reading and Sandwell for maths, repeated every six months to check pupils are on the right pathway.
- No "streaming": pathways aren't a ladder pupils climb up and down, but different environments suited to different needs.
- Most children are, in fact, still part of their chronological-age class (Empower) and join their pathway class only for what they specifically need, whether that's English and maths in a smaller, higher-support setting, or a sensory space to regulate in.
Children move fluidly between their pathway class and their age-group peers for breaks, trips, and any subjects they can access well. The goal is flexibility, not separation.
What it actually took
None of this happened by accident, and Caroline is candid about the hurdles. Getting the right staff took time. Budget had to follow the vision, not the other way round. And practical constraints, like room sizes, furniture, and storage, kept threatening to make decisions on the school's behalf instead of the children.
One story stands out: Caroline moved her own office to share with her deputy, SENCO and pastoral lead, freeing up her old office for a pathway class of nine pupils. But the room felt tight because of the size of a desk left over from a previous head. Swapping it for something smaller changed the room, and the behaviour of one pupil, who stopped dysregulating altogether once he had more space. It was a reminder, she says, of how easily practical inertia can end up dictating provision rather than pupil need.
Staff development has been central throughout. The whole school has trained with the British Sec Association and the Autism Education Trust, with Elklan communication training next on the list, alongside targeted CPD for teachers with specific needs in their classes. A significant chunk of the school's budget goes directly into this.
Timetabling stays strict and consistent, because, as Caroline puts it, children (and, she admits, staff) don't thrive on constant change. Teaching assistant deployment is also structured around actual need: pathway classes have TA support throughout, while mainstream classes from Year 2 upward often don't, because smaller class sizes and narrower attainment spread make it more manageable without one.
Bringing families with you
Not every parent embraced the changes instantly. Some worried that a pathway placement meant something negative for their child. Caroline's approach has been to invite parents in and show them the evidence directly. Comparing a child's workbook before and after moving onto a pathway is often enough to shift the conversation from concern to support.
The results back it up. One pupil's attendance rose from 30% to 80% after joining the Flourish pathway. He told an Ofsted inspector it was because "before I couldn't come to school and now I can." Spelling data from one six-month period showed 12 out of 16 pupils on the pathways made a year or more of progress, with three making two years' progress.
Advice for schools considering the same path
Asked what she'd tell other school leaders thinking about something similar, Caroline starts with culture, not systems:
- Audit your language. Gloucester Road caught itself describing attainment as "well below," deficit language that needed to change.
- Look hard at your policies. Are behaviour and uniform policies flexible, or built for a "one size fits all" pupil who doesn't actually exist in most classrooms?
- Check how staff talk about pupils, not just in lessons but in the staff room.
- Design for your most complex child. If provision works for them, it tends to work for everyone.
- Don't let practical barriers make decisions for you. Question whether a constraint is really about space or budget, or whether it's really about what's easiest.
Her closing message is the same one that runs through the whole conversation: stage, not age. Be creative, be willing to experiment, and keep the focus on what pupils actually need, not what's administratively convenient. As she puts it, when children are happier, staff workload eases too, sometimes through surprisingly small changes, like swapping the wall of laminated displays for a bit of empty white space, or simply putting comfortable chairs in the classroom.
Thinking about how your school's SEN provision could evolve? Caroline's experience shows that meaningful change doesn't require a bigger building or budget overnight. It starts with an honest look at culture, and the willingness to try something different.
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