WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY....
SUPPORTING OUR SCHOOL COMMUNITIES TO MEET THE NEEDS
OF EVERY YOUNG PERSON Comment by ASHLEY WINTERS, Head of Primary for Washwood Heath Multi-Academy Trust
H
aving worked in education for nearly 30 years (13 of those years as Headteacher in three schools), I am now a Director of Primary at Washwood Heath Multi-Academy Trust in Birmingham, where I support and challenge five primary schools, as well as being involved in developing the organisation as a whole. I lead on the Inclusion Framework for the Trust, supporting the development of SEND.
We are a tight-knit team at Washwood Heath Multi-Academy Trust and are aligned in our values to deliver equitable life chances to all of our pupils. We work collaboratively and constantly on strengthening our strategic approaches and shared expertise so that we are meeting the needs of our SEND young people and supporting our academies in fulfilling our responsibilities to all our students.
Like many colleagues up and down the country, we acknowledge that meeting all of our young people’s needs is our core responsibility. To simply say there is not enough resource, or to use language that suggests some of our young people are a problem or burden to a school, is totally unacceptable. However, we also acknowledge that we do need to respond to an increasingly wide range of needs amongst a greater proportion of our students, and this is a significant challenge for every school today.
Fortunately, as a trust of seven schools in East Birmingham, we have the collective capacity and geographical closeness to plan together, and share our ideas, strategies and resources. This has enabled us to create and implement a pupil-focused strategy that, along with our trust and school values, underpins all of our development and improvements in our SEND and mainstream provision. Our collective response has been broadly two-fold: pedagogy and curriculum; structures and strategy. In terms of curriculum and pedagogy, our trust uses frameworks for Teaching and Learning and Curriculum to ensure that there are common concepts for collaborative development, with shared examples of best practice. For Teaching and Learning, this includes high expectations and adaptations to ensure all students can achieve their very best. By enabling teachers to take ownership of their classrooms, with a particular focus on our pupils with SEND, we can significantly extend opportunities for all of our young people. Our structures and strategy development work began with the formation of two working groups, which ensured that a range of colleagues across the trust contributed to our overall approach. Through this important work, and our integrated curriculum financial planning, we have been able to provide each academy with a support provision
for integrating pupils who have been assessed as needing further support – whether that be academic or personal development - into the main curriculum and full academy life. We have called this our NEST provision, because we intend that these pupils, with the right assessment and provision in place, will fly the nest as soon as possible. Our NESTs will support groups of up to eight pupils whose needs may have already been identified - or are on the pathway to being identified. One of the key focus areas for these groups is language development. Our NEST provision is a means of supporting pupils in integrating with their peers or easing their transition to alternative provision. There is no time constraint, and the length of support will be determined by the individual progress of each student. Some of these pupils need learning geared to pre-early years from 0 to 12 months. To support academies, our SEND leaders from across the trust have developed a SEND strategy that specifically focuses on pupils requiring learning support for the pre-early years stage (birth to 12 months). Using research from NASEN and the Education Endowment Foundation, leaders have also developed a tiered curriculum to support pupils working well-below their chronological age, whilst recognising that these young people also need to be supported with an individual pathway.
Another strand to this important work is ensuring our pupils are ‘school-ready’ from the moment they arrive at our academies. Colleagues in another working group recently presented ideas to improve transitions and parent and carer engagement. These ideas were approved by the wider trust leadership group and have been developed into a trust-wide Transition strategy.
Our two immediate focuses are on our younger pupils who are starting their school life aged 4 years (transitioning from home or nursery) and our 11-year-olds who are making the significant move to secondary school.
Building connections with our families before their children have started school has been a key part of this development. Although it is early days, we are already seeing that by increasing and improving our communication between staff, parent /carers and any other adults from professional bodies, our pupils are receiving a more positive experience of school from the start.
Building connections with partnerships is equally important to our improvement journey. Along with several Birmingham-based trusts, we have recently been working with BEP (Birmingham Education Partnership) on a leadership programme for SEND. This work, underpinned by self-evaluation, has informed the development of our Inclusion Framework. We are continuing to look at other partnerships that will inform our learning and look forward to sharing our progress with you.
Some things to consider: • Know and understand the trust/school SEND policy and/or strategy • Consider readily available quality research, particularly the EEF guidance and Whole School SEND for SEND practice in schools
• Promote the use of adaptive teaching for SEND pupils, to ensure they are included in all aspects of learning
• Engage with CPD, wider groups and partnerships to support knowledge and understanding of SEND
• Promote positive relationships through effective communication to all stakeholders and encourage joined-up thinking
• Remember – what is good for SEND pupils is good for all pupils! 24
www.education-today.co.uk September 2025
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