SEN FOCUS
Addressing special educational needs in the classroom I
n our second feature this month, Education
Today looks at helping children with special educational needs. We speak to Claire Osbourne, senior advisor for behaviour and emotional difficulties at Telford and Wrekin council, about its emotional
learning programme and how using hands- on, visual resources from LEGO® Education has helped pupils to learn about themselves and understand their feelings more effectively.
Tell us a little about what you do and the pupils you work with The Behaviour Support Advisory Team (BSAT) for Telford and Wrekin promotes inclusion in schools across the local authority by supporting children and young people in their social and emotional
development. We work with a number of children who have lots of barriers to learning. This can be because they’re on the autistic spectrum, have heightened anxiety or other social difficulties, which makes it difficult for them to communicate with their peers or the adults around them. When they find it hard to express their emotions, it often leads to acting out and the development of challenging behaviour. BSAT works in partnership with children, teachers and parents to meet the needs of these pupils and encourage a more positive learning environment for all of them.
What made you decide to run the LEGO® Education project? We’ve found that for some children, talking therapies just aren’t that effective, as you’ll often get quite closed responses from them, for example, when you ask them how they’re feeling about a situation or event, they’ll simply respond with, “I don’t know”. To combat this and work on expressing their feelings more effectively, we decided to use BuildToExpress as a vehicle for these children to create visual representations of
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their ideas, which can also be incredibly helpful for pupils who aren’t very literate. We focus on flexible, innovative, collaborative
and most importantly, child-centred approaches; with this project, we’ve worked in a therapeutic manner, with one-to-one sessions between pupil and practitioner as it gives the child a better chance to open up in a safe and comfortable space. BuildToExpress was a perfect addition to this, as it allows pupils to build something entirely unique to them, representing how they view relationships, situations and the world around them in a very personal way.
What type of activities are involved in these sessions? We’ll usually start off by asking children to tell us about their family and home situation. From this, they build scenes including all the important people in their life, which will typically lead to conversations about the relationships between these figures, so this in itself may present any issues that need to be addressed. Our main focus is getting pupils to visualise and
October 2016
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