Drop The Kerb, Keep The Challenge: Why Adaptive Teaching Matters

I can’t help it. I’m obsessed with adaptive teaching

I make no apology for the focus, because I believe adaptive teaching is one of the most important things we do. And for it to be effective, it cannot sit on its own. It needs the right culture around it, running through the school and into the curriculum children actually meet.

So before we talk about strategies, let me start with why this matters so much.

Why we adapt

Picture the world we want. There is a line I keep coming back to: the well-being of one is nothing compared to the well-doing of all.

Now look at where we are. We know that children who underachieve at school are more likely to face compromised life chances. That links to health issues, physical and mental. It links to housing instability. It reduces life expectancy. And those children often grow up to have children of their own, and the cycle continues.

Here is the part that should stop us in our tracks. Children with additional needs who become adults are disproportionately represented in every single one of those measures.

That is exactly why adaptive teaching will always matter. As educators, disrupting that cycle of deprivation is our great mission and our great opportunity. It is where we get to say, enough is enough.

The teacher is front and centre

A colleague of mine, Katherine Walsh, shares a powerful image of an iceberg, and I have borrowed it shamelessly.

The tip is the five or six children in a class of 30 with an identified need. But below the surface are many more children with barriers to learning that have not been formally recognised.

Those barriers are noticed and supported best in the classroom, by the teacher. A SENCO does extraordinary work across a whole school, but they can never fully know every child, in every subject, in every lesson, the way the class teacher can. So we need to remind teachers that they are front row and centre. They are the ones who can see where a child is, understand their barriers, build on their strengths, and work from there.

Necessary but not sufficient

There is a barrier in our society that gets in the way, and it is worth naming.

The medical model has done a lot of good. It works with a person, offers a diagnosis, and that label can unlock support. A diagnosis is often necessary. But the question is whether it is sufficient.

Too often it is not. If all any of us ever do, families, carers, children and teachers alike, is reach for the label, the unintended message becomes: here is your diagnosis, now try to get better. And by the way, this might be permanent. It quietly says the problem is you, the person.

We have to challenge that. The diagnosis matters. It is just not the whole story.

The story of the dropped kerb

Let me tell you about Ed Roberts. In 1950s America he contracted polio and used a wheelchair, and he was paralysed from the neck down. He was bright enough to get into Berkeley, but he physically could not access the buildings where he was meant to learn.

So he became an activist. He pulled people together, they called themselves the Rolling Quads, and they became known as the curb cutters. They took pickaxes to the kerbs and dropped them from one side of the road to the other. They poured ramps over stone steps. They redesigned physical spaces to be accessible by design, not by default.

Think about what a dropped kerb does. It is necessary for someone using a wheelchair. It is necessary for someone with a visual impairment. And it is useful for a parent with a buggy, for a child who is not looking where they are going, for anyone at all.

Necessary for some, useful for all.

So the question for us is simple. In our classrooms, what do we do to drop the kerb?

Drop the kerb, keep the challenge

Someone always says, but if you drop the kerb, are you not just making learning easy?

No. Because the metaphor keeps going. You drop the kerb, but you still keep the kerb. We still want the challenge to be there. We just do not want a child to be unable to access the learning in the first place.

This is what people mean by desirable difficulties. The Goldilocks level of challenge, proportionate, where every child has a real opportunity to think, to learn, and to do it meaningfully.

That is where the social model comes in. It lets us point the blame in a different direction. It is not the person who is the problem, it is the barrier around them. And so many of those barriers are environmental, social and economic, which means schools have real power to remove or reduce them.

What adaptive teaching actually is

I will be honest. I struggle with some of the language floating around at the moment. I do not dispute that our teaching should be inclusive, but I wonder how concrete "inclusive teaching" is for a teacher making decisions in the classroom.

And when people say adaptive teaching is "just good teaching", I think that is reductive and unhelpful.

Adaptive teaching is a proportionate response to a class or a child who is struggling to reach success. It is not about lowering expectations. It is the opposite. It is about setting them sky high, and holding that height of success just as firmly for a child aiming at grade 2 as for a child aiming at grade 9.

Children struggle to reach that height because of barriers. Maybe task initiation. Maybe attention. Maybe they are strong visual-spatial thinkers in a lesson built entirely on chronological processing. Once we identify the barrier, we can lift the lid.

To do that, adaptive teaching has to be both reactive and proactive. Reactive is in the moment: the mini whiteboards that reveal a misconception, the turn-and-talk where you hear it seeping through, the live marking as you circulate. React, adapt, overcome.

Proactive is by design: sequencing the curriculum with logical coherence, and planning lessons with the likely barriers already in mind. If I know several children in a class struggle with task initiation, I build in clear success criteria and concrete steps to get them going.

Bounded autonomy, not lift and drop

Schools often give teachers a curriculum, and that is a good thing. The problem is when teachers lift and drop a lesson without thinking.

So we need to give teachers the curriculum and the skill to adapt it. Thank you for the lesson, now let me think about who is in front of me, and how this example might not land with this class. That is bounded autonomy, and it is where the real craft lives.

Underneath it all sits executive function, which I think of as the air traffic controller. Working memory, attention, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, organisation, self-monitoring, managing emotions, and task initiation. When we understand where a child is in developing these, rather than seeing only a label, we work smarter, and we start to see the diversity of conditions through the unity of shared barriers to learning.

Why the universal matters most

At Pathfinder, our trust of 21 schools around York, we came back to adaptive teaching in a big way as new schools and staff joined us.

We asked where to start. Katherine would say you would never open an inclusion base without first thinking hard about the curriculum. I wonder if we think hard enough about the curriculum of our CPD for teachers.

So we built shared language, six principles of adaptive practice, and used a self-evaluation toolkit across our schools to test our hunches, trying to falsify them rather than prove them. This half term, to improve what we do for our six and a half thousand pupils, our staff have been rehearsing something as simple and as powerful as a strong start: meeting children at the door, using their name, connecting before correcting, and setting a progressively challenging retrieval activity. Good CPD gives teachers time to rehearse, script and plan for tomorrow.

I was sceptical about how it would land. Then I stood on my own corridor and watched four teachers, peppering children with warmth and kindness as they arrived. For the children who need it most, that warmth is everything.

Get the universal right, and you bolster the baseline for everyone. That is what gives leaders and teachers the headspace to do the harder work for the few children who genuinely need something more.

Drop the kerb. Keep the challenge. And let us flourish together.

Andy Young is Co-Director of Pathfinder Teaching School Hub.