The Teacher's Guide to SEN

Natalie Packer

• Verlag: Crown House Publishing
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785832192
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Education General

In The Teacher's Guide to SEN Natalie Packer outlines what all teachers need to know about SEN, and provides a range of practical tips and ideas that can be applied in the classroom. One of the key messages of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice, first introduced in 2014, is that every teacher is responsible and accountable for every pupil in their class, including those with SEN. So what does this mean in practice for you as a class or subject teacher? Essentially, it requires you to understand every individual's needs, have a range of relevant knowledge and skills and have the confidence to try out some new approaches. This book is your essential guide to meeting these requirements. The Teacher's Guide to SEN details the areas of need teachers are most likely to encounter, including: speech, language and communication needs (SLCN); autism (or ASD); moderate learning difficulties (MLD); specific learning difficulties (SpLD), including dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia; social, emotional and mental health needs; and physical needs, including visual impairment (VI), hearing impairment (HI) and physical disability. It also provides a useful overview of the many potentially unfamiliar acronyms used in SEN. Special educational needs and disability (SEND) is an umbrella terms which covers a varied array of different needs. They may impact upon learning and cognition, behaviour, social interactions, or an individual's ability to access the curriculum and certain activities in the same way as their peers. With the appropriate support, these needs need not be a barrier to learning, as this book demonstrates. The Teacher's Guide to SEN offers practical hands-on strategies to ensure high-quality teaching for all, together with key facts, real-life case studies and questions for reflection. The comprehensive advice includes: defining special educational needs; understanding your responsibilities; identifying pupils with SEN and putting support in place as part of the graduated approach; contributing to SEN reviews and education, health and care plans (EHC plans); making reasonable adjustments in the classroom; delivering inclusive, high-quality teaching for all; raising expectations; classroom strategies, focused on feedback, planning, questioning, modelling and scaffolding learning; developing relationships with pupils and their families; effective partnership working with teaching assistants, parents and outside agencies; and tracking and reviewing progress and provision. Relevant to all primary and secondary practitioners, this is an essential point of reference for busy teachers, including trainees, NQTs or indeed any practitioner who would like to refresh their knowledge or gather some new ideas to try in the classroom.

Part 1

The inclusive teacher

Chapter 1

What are special
educational needs?

Defining SEN

Imagine it’s the start of the year and you’ve been given a new class list by a member of the senior leadership team (SLT) or your head of department. They tell you that this is a class with ‘lots of SEN’. (Clearly they think you’re up to the challenge!) What are your initial thoughts? What information will you need about the pupils? And what does ‘having SEN’ actually mean anyway?

The term special educational needs is one that has been used within education for a number of years. It refers to children and young people who have learning difficulties or disabilities that make it significantly harder for them to learn or access education than most of their peers. A formal definition of SEN is given on page 15 of the Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice:

A child or young person has SEN if they have a learning difficulty or disability which calls for special educational provision to be made for him or her.

According to the code, a pupil has a learning difficulty if they have:

a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of their peers of the same age, or

a disability that prevents or hinders them from making use of the facilities generally provided for their peers (this includes difficulties in accessing the curriculum)

Learning difficulties and disabilities cover a wide range of issues, including challenges in acquiring basic skills, specific difficulties with reading, writing, numeracy or motor skills, communication problems, emotional difficulties, mental health issues, sensory needs, physical needs, etc. This is by no means an exhaustive list and later on in this chapter you will come across further information about the broad areas of need which are identified within the Code of Practice. Whatever the difficulty might be, however, the pupil will require special educational provision to help remove potential barriers to learning.

Special educational provision

If delivering high-quality lessons is the norm for you, no doubt you’ll be meeting the needs of most of the pupils in your class. But even as a brilliant teacher, you will still come across some pupils who require additional provision. Additional provision goes beyond the differentiated approaches and learning arrangements that we would usually expect to be in place as part of HQT. Special educational provision may include some, or all, of the following:

A highly personalised curriculum and individual timetable – e.g. a curriculum that includes life skills lessons.

Specialist resources or equipment – e.g. a wheelchair, communication aids.

The use of specific and individualised strategies in the classroom – e.g. time out, alternative forms of communication.

Additional interventions to target basic skills – e.g. literacy or numeracy group intervention.

Additional support from an adult or peer – e.g. support from a TA.

Support with physical or personal care difficulties – e.g. eating, toileting, getting around school safely.

Input from other professionals – e.g. specialist teachers, educational psychologists, speech and language therapists.

Individualised learning plans that identify specific targets and outline the special educational provision to be put in place.

Schools have a duty to make special educational provision available for any pupil who needs it. This means that every teacher within the school has a responsibility to deliver HQT and to support any special educational provision in place for individuals.

Did you know?

Just over 14 per cent of pupils in the UK are currently identified as having SEN.1 On average, that equates to approximately four pupils in every mainstream class.

A little bit of history

In the UK today, there is no question over the right of pupils with SEN to be included within our education system. However, this was not always the case. When compulsory schooling began in the late 1800s, many children with learning disabilities were deemed to be ‘uneducable’ and so were denied the formal right to any education. Some provision existed for deaf, blind, ‘defective’ and epileptic children under the Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act 1893 and the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act 1899. However, it was almost one hundred years later before any significant change took place when the Education (Handicapped Children) Act 1970 was introduced to ensure entitlement to an education for every child, irrespective of their needs or difficulties.2

In the late 1970s the government set up an inquiry, led by the Warnock Committee, to look at the needs of children who required additional provision in school. The committee’s report3 gave rise to the Education Act 1981, introducing the term ‘special educational needs’ and establishing statements of need, which were legal documents outlining provision for pupils at the most severe end of the SEN continuum.4

A series of other acts, legislation and statutory guidance have since followed, all of which have aimed to increasingly promote the inclusion of pupils with SEN in the education system. This included the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001,5 which prevented discrimination against people with disabilities in their access to education, and the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice 2001.6 The code, which provided a clear ...