FEATURE FOCUS: SEND
Technology is guaranteeing an inclusive education for all students
educational need – that’s 15.5% of all pupils. To support these pupils and SEND schools, the government has increased its funding provision in recent years. In April last year, the government announced a £280m funding boost for young people with SEND. In August 2020, an additional £780m was allocated for children with SEND, on top of the increase in funding announced for all schools at the time.
How SEND teaching and learning has evolved
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n our first feature this month looking at SEND provision and its associated topics we’re delighted to hear from Jonathan Moore, Education Engagement Manager at SMART Technologies UK, who explains how technology in the classroom is allowing students of all abilities to prosper.
Support and funding for special education needs and disability (SEND) pupils has come a long way over the past decade, and rightly so. According to government figures, around 1.4 million pupils in English schools have an identified special
This monetary support from government and local authorities has spearheaded improvements to the curriculum and provided more support for teachers of SEND pupils and for the specialised schools, but it wasn’t always like this. Inclusivity in the classroom is a relatively modern requirement. It was around the late 1970’s when improvements started to be made. The well-known Warnock Report, which provided the first review of SEND in England and was published in 1978, stated that “inclusion is about much more than the type of school that children attend: it is about the quality of their experience; how they are helped to learn, achieve, and participate fully in the life of the school.” Since then, SEND teaching and provision has come a long way. And, like most of the education
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sector, it has been embracing technology to support classroom teaching. From the use of overhead projectors to the introduction of the internet and innovations such as interactive whiteboards in classrooms, edtech has evolved alongside the inclusivity improvements being made in the classroom. As a result, most of the technology we see in the classroom today has been designed to support all types of teaching, including SEND.
For us at SMART, ensuring access for all students was a key consideration in the development of our SMART 6000s V3 panel, which is the only model currently manufactured with 3D physical accessories. The Tool Sense platform allows teachers and students to manipulate real world objects to interact intuitively with digital content, increasing engagement and knowledge retention. The panel has been designed to improve active learning and can be of significant benefit to support pupils with special educational needs, and it is being used in SEND schools across the UK – including ALP schools, a chain of Independent Special Needs Schools.
How technology is being used in the SEND classrooms today
ALP had an overhaul of its Edtech strategy October 2022
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