High-TEMPO teaching and learning: Strengthening the universal offer to improve outcomes for students with SEND

Daniel Gent, Deputy Headteacher, Chipping Norton School, UK

Introduction

Chipping Norton School (CNS), an average-sized, fully comprehensive school in West Oxfordshire, has secured improved outcomes for its students with SEND by prioritising teacher development in five areas: Task design, Explanation, Modelling, Practice and Oracy.

Implementation

Prior to the launch of High-TEMPO in 2018/19, typical practice tended towards open-ended projects, where planning favoured the looser structures of discovery, research or group-based learning. This impacted student behaviour, and a too-social atmosphere pervaded classrooms.

Leaders focused PD activity on ensuring that all teachers understood cognitive load theory, specifically the principle that what students attend to they think about, and what they think about they remember (Willingham, 2009). Teachers then learned how to deliver the five components of the High-TEMPO framework (Figure 1). Several strategies emerged as a model for best practice (the use of recall starters, comparative models and practice in ‘Strong Silence’).

High-TEMPO Teaching and Learning at Chipping Norton School

Figure 1: Chipping Norton School’s High-TEMPO Teaching and Learning Framework (drawing upon a body of research, evidence and advice, some of which is listed in the references)

Adaptation over differentiation

Prior to 2019, PD focused on differentiation to meet the needs of learners. Teachers were overwhelmed by well-meaning advice to do myriad things for many different children, all in the same lesson. Not only was this approach demotivating and unrealistic but, to be successful, a second unintended harmful impact had to be overcome: student negative self-perception as a result of being made to feel different.

Inclusive, knowledge-rich pedagogies now encourage teachers to plan with the needs of students with SEND in mind, ‘building in’ rather than ‘bolting on’ adaptations (Walsh and Thompson, 2020). At CNS, leaders embrace this philosophy and articulate it under a ‘one-for-all’ principle: if an adaptation is worth making for a single child, then it should be offered to every child. Redesigned SEND profiles reflected this: the advice given to teachers was significantly reduced to a handful of quality-first teaching strategies, which were mapped onto each of the five strands of the framework (see Figure 1, column 2). Students with SEND selected the strategies they felt would be most beneficial to them, and this was the advice given to teachers to follow in their planning (via SEND profiles). With some strategies proving more popular than others (such as ‘providing named steps for task completion’), PD could then focus on how to resource these strategies and build resourcing into the curriculum.

A creative approach to the SEND register and evidence of impact

Tracking the outcomes of students with SEND is notoriously difficult (Hollingsworth, 2023). Research exploring the ‘postcode lottery’ of SEND designation has shown that the school a child attends is the biggest determining factor of whether or not they will be identified as having SEND (Hutchinson, 2021) – indicating that the decision as to whether a child’s needs are ‘additional to or different from’ (Children and Families Act, 2014) is a subjective one.

A falling SEND register, as students progress through school, might therefore be read as an indicator of successful SEND provision through the universal offer. At CNS, this trend is evident when comparing the number of students with SEND in a cohort on entry with the number of students with SEND in the same cohort on exit (between the years 2022 and 2024). On average, these cohorts saw the number of students on the SEND register fall from 19 per cent on arrival in Year 7 to 11 per cent on exit in Year 11. The size of the SEND register at CNS declined and remained low, even as national averages increased (DfE, 2026). Tracking the outcomes of those removed from the SEND register provides even more compelling evidence of impact: this interest group, ‘Formerly SEND in Year 7’, achieved an average Progress 8 of +0.14 across the three years where this measurement was possible (2022–24).

Managing the SEND register in this way was not an entirely strategic decision. The direction of travel was also set by budgetary constraints, which saw a large reduction in the size of the SEND department (learning support assistants (LSAs) left and were not replaced). That said, a leaner, more effective SEND department emerged, which aims to follow the best practice model of LSA deployment (EEF, 2025), with LSAs embedded within core subjects and increasingly specialist teaching assistants who provide targeted intervention ‘in addition to’ the curriculum.

Limitations and next steps

High-TEMPO has strengthened both the curriculum and the quality of teaching across the majority of classrooms. However, cohorts at CNS reflect national trends, with teachers experiencing increasing levels of need displayed by increasing numbers of students. As a result, in recent years, our SEND register has grown because we now view difficulties with mental health and wellbeing as SEND (Tirraoro, 2024). This places pressure on teachers, but with guidance as clear as that offered by High-TEMPO, leaders can now concentrate more time and effort on pursuing the goal of high-quality intervention and bespoke curriculum pathways.

High-TEMPO takeaways

To implement a knowledge-rich framework like High-TEMPO, leaders might:

• frame existing poor practice within a broader cultural context – many established teachers were trained in strategies that have now been discredited
• radically declutter the advice given to teachers, focusing PD on a few things done exceptionally well
• promote adaptation over differentiation and use SEND profiles to reinforce specific, quality-first teaching principles that benefit all.

To secure improved outcomes for students with SEND through low-effort, high-impact adaptations, teachers might:

• rearrange recall starters so that the easiest question is asked first
• declutter presentations using fewer words per slide, enhanced by imagery
• capture ‘named and posted steps’ in curriculum resources (‘tick lists for task completion’) that can be deployed repeatedly during extended practice.

Read more from In Praxis: SEND and Inclusion