FEATURE FOCUS: SEND
awareness and can utilise their own experiences and training to assist our pupils. One of the most useful skills to have and to build upon is resilience. It can be tough going on some days and you can feel progress slipping away. One of our pupils might be having a particularly bad day. But it’s just a blip. All our staff are incredible and vital to the success of all of our pupils. Our curriculum is focused on developing the cornerstones of literacy, numeracy, oracy and personal, social and emotional literacy. The curriculum builds on this solid bedrock, giving pupils access to all the subjects that they would have in a mainstream setting, but delivered in a way that continues to promote the development of key skills and values.
Emma Hampton -Transform Trust: Inclusivity is at the heart of our Trust and our family of schools. We have a vast range of different SEND needs across our schools including SEMH, SLCN, MLD and ASD. One of our core values is equity. We believe strongly that we must be ambitious for all our children and support and empower them by understanding their individual needs, to achieve their potential.
Our staff are increasingly creative in the way they are making learning effective, fun and accessible to all. Like most mainstream class sizes, we typically have around 30 children in most of our classrooms which some of our children find challenging at times. We believe these children’s needs should be met within the classroom wherever possible so that they can feel a sense of belonging and build their social and emotional skills with their peers and staff members. It may not be strikingly obvious to an untrained eye, but our schools have created dedicated spaces within their nurturing environments for those children with complex needs to help with self-regulation. These include sensory spaces and cosy and quiet reading areas which are perfect for some time away from their peers or the hustle and bustle of the classroom or playground, one-to-one learning or smaller group breakout sessions.
Within our Trust we have experts that work with our schools that need them most. We also have various panels, such as our Enhanced Panel, that will also provide support to those children with complex needs. We also have an attendance panel to help with our Emotionally Based School Avoiders who may be struggling with their school or classroom environment or relationships with their peers.
Our schools have autonomy with their overall school curriculums, but we make sure that we also offer personalised curriculums to those children who need it. Our personalised curriculums are for children who are unable to access whole school curriculum with some adaptation. Each one is based around appropriate target-setting for that child and designed to meet those targets. For example, a target for a child could be counting to ten. We have to ask ourselves, what do the small steps looks like? What activities does this child need to attain this? This is more beneficial to the child instead of simplifying the whole-school curriculum. It is more about the individual. “Assess, Plan, Do, Review “ we regularly analyse and review their progression and their outcomes and chart their successes and make the necessary changes if required as no two children are alike. They are all unique. We can
October 2023
already see that it is having a positive effect on these children and the staff.
How do you empower your staff to be able to support young people with complex needs within their school
Jo Hill - North Star Academy Trust: Our Trust mantra is ‘reshaping the future’ – so every staff meeting falls within our overall CPD strategy; helping us to ensure that our young people have positive futures. Our experienced teachers are sharing best practice with our less experienced teachers. We use experts in the SEMH and SEND field to deliver our formal CPD to all staff, not just our teachers. Like mainstream schools, we also have focused inset days, and these are tailored to the needs of our staff to ensure they are empowered and equipped with the tools to reach their own potential and serve the needs of our young people. Our Trust has created its own CPD portal which is used as an everyday resource and contains useful videos and PowerPoint sessions.
We are innovative in our CPD approach, and are currently working around the science of learning, teaching children how to think about learning, establishing our own action-based research in our schools to develop further our pedagogy, which we then use to support our schools and mainstream schools and trusts through our outreach provision.
Emma Hampton -Transform Trust: At Transform we run the majority of our CPD centrally to ensure our schools all have access to the most effective training opportunities. We visit all our schools regularly to showcase the CPD sessions we have available and how each would benefit them. As a reasonably large Trust, we are fortunate to have a specialist CPD division, Transform Applied headed up by Liz Barratt. Liz and her team will spend time with schools and individual staff members to ensure our CPD is relevant and effective. We perform regular Quality Assurance checks at each school to see what is going well and where they need more support.
There’s a two-pronged approach to the way we deliver our SEND CPD. We have our Guardians
groups who work for the benefit of our most vulnerable learners. This includes a SEND network for our sencos. This is a forum-based network where we can share best practices. Transform Applied also offer training based on the needs across the Trust. The focus strand is personalised provision for children with complex needs. This includes appropriate target setting, and how to structure lessons for those unable to access the whole-school curriculum.
How do you use your CPD to help other schools outside of your Trust
Jo Hill - North Star: We are fortunate to have an outreach provision which currently comprises of six teachers and a mentor who go out to mainstream schools delivering training in SEMH needs. We are usually asked by a school to go in to support a specific child or issue and tailor a package of support to upskill a member of staff or a staff team. It can be a lonely job in mainstream schools with a high number of students special needs, the team can also offer coaching and supervision support. Some is centrally funded by the local authority. We have helped over 50 schools since the pandemic, alone and have built meaningful relationships with a staff in a range of roles.
You have to be skilled in being able to adapt to someone else’s environment quickly. Positive relationships with staff are important as you have dialogue to improve both the classroom and their knowledge base. Our team have a vast amount of knowledge and experiences and help to build self-confidence and give the right support where needed. Mainstream schools say the impact that we make really has a knock-on effect on the wider school, not just the individual they have invited us to help to support. So we are making support available that impacts on the whole system.
Emma Hampton -Transform Trust: We are always delighted to share best practice with any schools outside of our Trust where possible. Our Transform Applied offer is available to other schools and we are often asked by other Trusts to do provide CPD regarding curriculums, subject leadership and inclusion.
www.education-today.co.uk 31
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
