Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Gillian O’Donoghue and Dr Jill Mitchell for assisting with the literature search, and the following colleagues who provided helpful ideas: Simona D'Alessio (European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education), Donald Beasley Institute (New Zealand), Alan Dyson (Manchester University, England), David Egnor (U.S. Department of Education), Chris Forlin (Hong Kong Institute of Education), Liz Horrocks (University of South Australia, Australia), Matti Kuorelahti (University of Jyvaskyla, Finland), Shirley McBride (Canada), Angus Macfarlane (University of Canterbury), Sonja Mafarlane (New Zealand), Hazel Phillips (New Zealand), Paul Retish, (University of Iowa, USA), Tom Skrtic (Kansas University, USA), Lottie Thomson (New Zealand), Rud Turnbull (Kansas University, USA), Christa Van Kraayenoord (University of Queensland, Australia), and Chris Walther-Thomas (Kansas University, USA).

We also thank Jenny Poskitt and Mandia Mentis from Massey University for their helpful reviews of an earlier draft of this report.

Executive Summary

Aims and Scope of the Review

This review was carried out under a contract with the New Zealand Ministry of Education, which contained the following requirements:

A literature review of national and international developments in the use of the Individual Education Plan (IEP) with schools and families, with particular attention to special education assessment practice(s) and their relationship to the IEP process.

The purposes of the review were defined as follows:

1. To undertake a literature review of national and international developments in IEP processes and special education assessment practice to contribute to the Ministry of Education’s current project to review, revise and position the Individual Education Programme (IEP) Guidelines in relation to:
   • the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education 2007),
   • current assessment practices,
   • effective teaching and learning practices, and
   • engagement and reporting to parents, family and whanau (National Standards).
2. To provide both New Zealand and international research evidence of effective and/or evidence based practice, which, along with the data being collected by the Ministry of Education project team, will ultimately inform the future use of IEPs.

The scope of the review was defined as follows:

1. The focus of the review is to be on:
   • students with special needs in all school sector settings,
   • students as learners, not the disability or the diagnosis they present with,
   • the use of IEPs with schools and parents,
   • the role of special education staff and other agencies in the IEP process, and
   • what makes the IEP process effective for schools, students and their families, and what evidence there is of their effectiveness, with particular reference to the educational implications.
2. The literature sourced will include:
   • studies from both New Zealand and overseas, and
   • peer reviewed journals and other publications.

Sources of Information

In carrying out the review 319 sources were consulted. In the 199 references included in the annotated bibliography (see Appendix Two), 124 came from the USA (62%) and 75 (38%) from outside the USA, including 14 sources from New Zealand.

The sources described in the annotated bibliography were predominantly post 2000 (145), with another 43 published between 1996 and 2000 and the remaining 11 in 1995 or earlier.

Analysis of Literature

The analysis was divided into four sections:

1. Origins, purposes and critiques of IEPs
2. Collaboration and partnerships in IEPs
3. Curriculum and IEPs
4. Assessment and IEPs

Origins, Purposes and Critiques of IEPs

1. IEPs had their origins in the USA in the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (PL 94-142) and have been re-affirmed in IDEA legislation ever since.
2. More recently, the focus in the US has shifted to the development of the IEP for implementation in regular classrooms.
3. IEPs are ubiquitous, virtually every country’s special education provisions containing them as a key element to its provisions for students with special educational needs.
4. In different countries, IEPs are variously referred to as ‘Negotiated Education Plans’, ‘Educational Adjustment Programs’, ‘Individual Learning Plans’, ‘Learning Plans’, ‘Personalised Intervention Programmes’, and ‘Supervisory Plans’.
5. Since 1997, the US has employed ‘Behavior Intervention Plans’ (BIPs) in addition to IEPs. These are usually accompanied by ‘Functional Behavior Assessment’ (FBA).
6. Having IEPs specifically focused on transition for students with SEN in their last few years of schooling is required in all countries where IEPs are in use.
7. The literature suggests that key components of transition planning are individualized planning, active involvement of student and family members, interagency collaboration, and transition-focused instruction.
8. Research has found that transition practices often exhibit flaws in the planning process, have low levels of student and family involvement, provide little evidence of interagency collaboration, and tend to focus on academic rather than vocational goals.
9. IEPs suffer from having multiple purposes ascribed to them, the same IEP document frequently being expected to serve educational, legal, planning, accountability, placement, and resource allocation purposes.
10. Ensuring that IEPs serve all their other roles without distorting the primacy of acting as an educational planning document is a challenge facing educational policy makers.
11. In addition to problems arising from the multiple purposes ascribed to them, three main criticisms of IEPs have been advanced: the undue influence of behavioural psychology, the over-emphasis on the individual, and their unproven efficacy.
12. However, Behavior Intervention Plans have a good, but not overwhelming, research base.

Collaboration and Partnerships in Developing IEPs

1. The early vision of legislation to support the education of students with special educational needs was that parents, families, whanau and schools should work together in an equitable partnership. However it was apparent even in the early days that equity and partnership would be difficult to achieve as schools started out in the dominant position.
2. The IEP process assumes cultural norms and values, in particular normalization and indvidualisation.
   When the majority-culture views and practices of school take little or no account of the cultural values of students’ home cultures, there is very often a breakdown in communication between home and school. This will have a negative impact on parent and teacher partnerships.
3. Teacher professional learning should focus on fostering teacher attitudes, knowledge, skills, and practices that will acknowledge, value, nurture, and build upon the cultural capital that
4. Māori and Pasifika learners bring from their cultures.
5. IEPs form a useful tool in curriculum preparation, the planning of instruction and in evaluating students’ programmes and services
6. All those involved in the education of students with IEPs should be involved in the development and implementation of these documents.
7. In the case of secondary schools, at least one subject specialist should be directly involved and others should be consulted by the lead professional in the IEP team.
8. All teachers should be provided with pre- and in-service training and support necessary for their participation in designing and implementing IEPs. Such training should include consideration of the teachers’ role in IEPs, working in a multi-disciplinary setting, partnerships with parents, ways of involving students, and how to implement and monitor student progress on IEP goals.
9. In scheduling IEP meetings every endeavour should be made to ensure the process is efficient and not too time-consuming, for example by considering teachers’ schedules when organising IEP meetings, employing technology to disseminate information to all team members, providing release time for teachers to undertake record-keeping and attend meetings, and scheduling several IEP meetings on one day and arrange for a relieving teacher.
10. There is widespread agreement that the involvement of parents in the education of their children overall and in the IEP process in particular is critical to the effectiveness of education for children with SEN.
11. There is extensive evidence for the effectiveness of active parental involvement in improving children’s academic and social outcomes.
12. Studies of participation of parents in the IEP process indicate that practice is patchy, with limitations in both the quantity and quality of the involvement
13. A range of barriers to parental involvement in general and to participation in the IEP process in particular has been identified.
14. Strategies for overcoming these barriers and facilitating the participation of parents in the IEP process have been outlined.
15. To the maximum extent possible, students should be involved in developing their own IEPs.
16. In some situations, students can take the lead in the IEP process.
17. Students should understand the purposes and benefits of IEPs.
18. IEPs should be part of the curriculum for students with special educational needs, with a focus on participation skills, goal-setting and self-determination.
19. Students should be prepared for participation in the IEP process through prior discussions with their teachers and given time to prepare for IEP meetings.
20. In the course of IEP meetings, parents and professionals should provide time and prompts for students to participate.
21. Consideration should be given to whether students should have the right to opt out of participating in developing their IEPs.
22. SENCos have a significant role in developing and monitoring IEPs.
23. In secondary schools, SENCos face considerable challenges in coordinating the writing of IEPs, keeping them up to date and linking with a wide range of subject teachers, tasks that involved excessive paperwork and which greatly reduced SENCos’ availability to perform other key tasks.
24. There is some evidence that IEPs in secondary schools do not change teachers’ approaches and have little impact on students’ learning
25. Recent moves in the UK are in the direction of:
    • reducing the number of students for whom IEPs are required so that they apply only to those who have needs that are ‘additional to’ or ‘different from’ other students in a differentiated curriculum;
    • emphasising ‘school action plans’ that involve differentiation of teaching approaches;
    • introducing the idea of students with similar needs having a ‘Group Education Plan’ (GEP), as distinct from IEPs.
26. An even more radical suggestion is that whole-school strategies for meeting special educational needs might be more effective, efficient and inclusive than the current individualised system, as expressed in IEPs.

Curriculum and IEPs

1. Approaches to conceptualising curricular for students with disabilities have moved from a developmental model in the 1970s, through a functional model in the 1980s and 1990s, to the contemporary model of embracing ways of enabling such students to participate in the general education curriculum.
2. In the US, IDEA 1997, IDEIA 2004 and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 specified that all students, including those with significant cognitive disabilities, must have the opportunity to participate and progress in the general curriculum.
3. The notion of students with special educational needs having access to the general curriculum has long been a feature of New Zealand special education policy.
4. To make the curriculum accessible, consideration should be given to the following alternatives in relation to content, teaching materials, and the responses expected from the learners:
   • modifications (e.g., computer responses instead of oral responses, enlarging the print),
   • substitutions (e.g., Braille for written materials);
   • omissions (e.g., omitting very complex work); and
   • compensations (e.g., self care skills).
5. Other modifications can include (a) expecting the same, but only less, (b) streamlining the curriculum by reducing its size or breadth, (c) employing the same activity but infusing IEP objectives, and (d) curriculum overlapping to help student grasp the connections between different subjects, for example.

Assessment and IEPs

1. Increasingly, students with special educational needs, including those with significant cognitive disabilities, are being expected to participate in their countries’ national or state assessment regimes.
2. High stakes’ assessments can have the effects of jeopardising inclusive education, a risk that can be exacerbated by the effects of international comparative studies of educational standards.
3. In the US, legislation since IDEA 1997 does not allow such students to be exempted from their states’ assessment programmes. Instead, educational authorities are required to provide alternate assessment for students who cannot participate in state or district assessments with or without accommodations. IEPs now must include a statement of any accommodations that are necessary to measure the academic achievement and functional performance of such students on state- and district-wide assessments.
4. The main types of alternate assessments comprise portfolios, IEP-linked bodies of evidence, performance assessments, checklists and traditional paper and pencil tests.
5. The assumptions underlying these provisions are twofold: (a) that higher expectations will lead to improved instructional programmes and (b) ultimately to higher student achievement.
6. The requirements for all students to participate in state- and district-wide assessments have been shown in some research to have had unintended negative consequences for students with disabilities, including higher rates of academic failure, lower self-esteem, and concerns that they would experience higher drop-out rates.
7. Countries or states should include both content area specialists and experts in severe disabilities in validating performance indicators used in alternate assessment.
8. With the shift to all students being required to participate in their countries’ national or state assessment regimes, teachers of students with disabilities will need professional development on their country’s or state’s academic standards, alternate achievement standards, and curriculum design that goes beyond functional domains.
9. In determining assessment policies, it is important to recognise and resolve as far as possible the tensions between measuring the health of the education system and protecting the interests of students with special educational needs.