Reflections on special educational needs support for Armed Forces children: Towards a communities of practice perspective

Children of armed forces personnel (Service children) can experience a range of factors as a result of their parents’ service. Factors such as geographic mobility and family separation intersecting with the experiences of special educational needs and disability (SEND) can result in a range of unique and pressing challenges for children, their families, and the schools that support them. It can exacerbate systemic challenges in SEND support. This is a conceptual paper drawing on the evaluation of the first two years of the Garrison ASSIST Project (GAP), a three-year collaborative project devised by schools serving a British Army garrison town in the north of England. GAP aimed to promote the sharing of resources and developing best practice in supporting Service children underpinned by a deep empathy for Service life. By applying a Communities of Practice lens (Wenger, 1998), this paper offers a novel way of understanding how schools negotiate competence, identity and collaboration in the context of mobility and the complexity of SEND. The paper focuses on data from a series of interviews and focus groups with parents, children and school staff (n=46). Three key themes were identified that can underpin successful practice: the importance of building strong relationships with families that are underpinned by trust, strong and open communication, and high-quality teaching. By conceiving of such initiatives as a community of practice, schools can seek to ameliorate some of the environmental and systemic challenges they experience in order to offer more consistent, inclusive and responsive support for children from armed forces families with SEND.