Small adjustments, big difference.

Introduction

The government’s SEND white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, has set out a new tiered model for supporting children with special educational needs and disabilities in England.

Central to the reforms is a push towards earlier identification of need and a greater expectation that mainstream schools will make structured adjustments to support struggling pupils.

Working memory sits squarely within that agenda. As our new research shows, teachers tell us that working memory difficulties are widespread in their classrooms and that too many schools lack the tools to identify them. Nearly a third of schools in our survey don’t assess working memory at all. Yet the strategies that help children with poor working memory – chunking, scaffolding, slowing the pace of instruction – are precisely the kind of teaching adjustments the white paper envisages.

The government white paper applies to schools in England, but the principles hold everywhere: early identification of working memory difficulties, followed by simple, practical classroom adaptations, can make a genuine difference to children who might otherwise be misidentified or overlooked. This report draws on the latest research and the experience of teachers and specialists to explain what working memory is, why it matters, how to spot when it’s restricted, and what to do about it.

What is working memory – and why does it matter?

“We’ve been looking carefully at this child and we can’t quite work out what the barrier to learning is, or why they find completing this task so difficult. They want to engage, but they just don’t seem to have quite enough room in their head to do so …”.

Many teachers will have had similar conversations with colleagues to the one described by SEN specialist, Beccie Hawes. The underlying issue, she says, isn’t the content of lessons but the difficulty some children have processing learning. The problem is working memory.

Working, or short-term, memory is the ability we have to remember a small amount of information for 15-30 seconds to complete a cognitive task. It’s importance to learning cannot be understated because it’s the place “where thinking happens, where we bring together ideas and transform them into something new”¹.

Learning requires children to follow instructions, to do one thing after another, to remember where they are up to and what they need to do next. But children with working memory challenges struggle because they forget the information needed to complete a task. They have difficulty taking notes and pulling out crucial facts while the teacher is talking, for instance, or holding numbers in their heads long enough to make a calculation.

New research

Experts estimate that 10-15% of any given class will have a working memory deficit². But recent research commissioned by GL Assessment suggests that the incidence in some classes is much higher and awareness of the problem among teachers varies widely.

According to our survey of more than 7,500 teachers conducted by Teacher Tapp last month³, one in five teachers say the proportion of their students with working memory problems is nearer 20% and a similar number think it’s 30% or more. Primary school teachers were more likely to say their children had working memory challenges than those in secondary schools – 48% of the former reported five or more children had difficulties compared to 34% of the latter.

Awareness of the importance of working memory amongst the profession has grown in recent years, not least because it’s now included in the Early Years Framework. According to our survey, most teachers say they are very (5%) or fairly (51%) confident about spotting working memory difficulties in children. Substantial minorities, however, say they are not very confident (28%) or not at all confident (8%).

Moreover, teachers are less certain in their school’s ability to identify such challenges. While a few (5%) say their school’s assessments identify almost all children with working memory difficulties accurately and a quarter (25%) say they can identify most of them accurately, 15% say their school’s assessments miss children, 2% say they misidentify children and almost a third (31%) say their schools don’t assess working memory at all.

Dr Tim Mills, a Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) adviser and the lead author for the DfE’s new writing framework, says that although awareness of the importance of working memory has increased in the profession, “that you can test it and that you can do something about it if it’s restricted, is much less widely known”.

Misconceptions

It’s sometimes assumed that poor working memory only affects children with special needs. Many of them will have such challenges, but as Tim points out, a restricted working memory is not in itself “a diagnosable disability. It’s something we have to attend to but it’s not a reason for putting a student on the SEND register.”

It’s possible to have working memory difficulties and a very high IQ. As he says, we all have limitations on our working memory, everyone can become overloaded if they have to take in too much information too quickly. But whereas most can handle six or seven elements in 15-30 seconds, those with working memory challenges struggle beyond a couple.

Jablai Salah, Headteacher of Yenton Primary School in Birmingham, agrees that in the past children with working memory challenges were often misidentified as SEN. “We may have been misdiagnosing children, because it’s possible to have a high IQ and a small working memory. So the first thing we need to understand is what children’s working memory is to begin with, and the earlier you can diagnose that, the better.”

Children with working memory challenges often exhibit similar behaviours. Superficially, they may seem fine, but they tend to be quite reserved or reluctant to participate in groups, they frequently lose things, don’t seem to be paying attention and often abandon tasks half-way through or go off at a tangent. But as Beccie says, “they’re not aloof because they don’t want to engage but because they’re working so hard to hold the information and process what they have been told.”

If they seem ‘overwhelmed’, that’s because they are: “They’ve taken in so much information that they can’t take in any more…”.

Introducing Recall

Informal observation and teacher assessment can help identify poor working memory up to a point, but as Holly Elderfield, Assistant Headteacher for Inclusion (SENDCo) at Minet Junior School in London, explains, what schools really need is a reliable, clear and consistent screener.

“When GL Assessment emailed inviting us to trial Recall, their digital working‑memory tool, we saw the opportunity immediately. What really appealed to us was that Recall doesn’t just give a general overview of working memory – it breaks it down into three areas: word recall, pattern recall and counting recall. That level of detail is exactly what we needed to understand our pupils more precisely and identify barriers that might otherwise be missed.”

The online assessment is straightforward, accurate, easy to administer, only takes 20-30 minutes and is suitable for children aged 7 to 16. “The instructions were clear, the guidance easy to follow and every query I had (especially around adding or changing pupils) was answered quickly and helpfully,” says Holly.

Tim agrees about the importance of early identification of the problem. “I think the first element has to be a form of screening. Personally, I’d like to see us move towards national screening at Year 1 or maybe 2, because then every school would know which children have a significantly below average working memory. And that’s the key.”

And he points to another benefit of screening: “I reckon if you said to an Ofsted inspector, ‘By the way, did you know we test all our kids for working memory? And then we adapt our teaching as a result’, that would be really powerful.”

‘Nothing fancy’

Working memory capacity develops a little as children age but it is essentially fixed, it can’t be increased. “It’s pretty much a case of what you’re born with is what you get,” Tim says. The challenge for teachers isn’t to build working memory but to try to mediate and mitigate any restriction.

“There’s a misconception that you can do exercises or buy brain training games to increase working memory, but they don’t work. If you have a poor working memory, you have poor working memory,” says Jablai. What teachers can do is adapt their teaching and teach children learning hacks. “It’s a bit like wearing glasses. You need them to work, to drive, to see. But you’re always going to have that adaptation.”

Beccie also warns against memory games that aren’t explicit about transferable skills. “Children get better at playing these games, but they don’t get better in terms of their memory pool, which can’t increase. What we can do is compensate. We can develop skills. But we have to be extremely explicit about what those skills look like in the classroom, so children know how to use them.”

The most effective strategies are surprisingly simple, “nothing fancy”, as Beccie puts it. “That surprises everyone, because they assume you’re going to recommend some great, big, magical intervention. But actually it’s about making small adjustments, ‘teaching tweaks’.” And they don’t just help children with poor working memory, “The gem of the thing for me is that these tweaks, while vital for some are valuable for all.”

Tim agrees: “I think that’s really key. Such pedagogical strategies are apposite for all children, not just those with restricted working memory. Not teaching too quickly, constant reminders, repetition, revision… We all have a very limited working memory and the hack around that is that we store a lot of it in long-term memory.”

Teaching tweaks

The small adjustments Beccie recommends are designed to give children a scaffold for remembering:

• Slow down: don’t overload children with too many instructions, slow down your teaching and give children time to process. If you’re wondering why they haven’t started working after you’ve stopped talking, it’s probably because they are trying to retrieve what you have said.
• Break down tasks: slice the task up into several smaller steps and give pupils a visual timeline so they know exactly what they have done, what’s next and what they need to do.
• Record information: equip children with cheap recording devices like talking tins that allow them to play back instructions.
• Recognise the value of routine: well-embedded, ingrained routines give children a sense of security and safety. They aren’t dependent on assimilating new information, they allow motor memory to kick in and they reduce cognitive load.

School-wide strategies

To ensure that teaching tweaks are supported across a school or trust, Beccie advises school leaders to adopt a number of simple stratagems:

• Make it okay to forget: “I talk to the children honestly about when I’ve forgotten and how it’s okay for grown-ups to have things that help make memory work. I show them that I have a diary, a special app on my phone with reminders, and that I make lists and Post-it notes. So children then realise everyone forgets and that we all need tricks to help us remember things, just like in the classroom.”
• Be explicit: tell your staff that while the curriculum may be fast paced, it’s fine to build in extra time into lessons for processing time. Even better, at the curriculum design stage, write in what support you expect to see in lessons.
• Dedicated memory skills lessons: carve out time every so often for staff to deliver a lesson on memory skills and compensatory tricks.
• Advise parents: show parents, perhaps during parental workshops, the memory tricks, routines and retrieval practices used in school that they can use at home.