Identifying needs and planning support
A child or young person with SEND will receive special educational provision, which means they have support to help them manage in school, and make progress.
The support your child receives will depend on their individual needs. This can look different in different schools, and for individual children and it may change over time as your child grows and develops. Support should be needs-led rather than diagnosis-led, meaning that schools should work together with you to identify the needs and barriers to learning, and put appropriate support in place, rather than wait for a diagnosis from an external service.
‘Support’ is anything that will help a child or young person achieve their full learning potential, and could include simple adjustments in the classroom such as using visuals, seating position, larger font, adapted resources or a short sensory or movement break. Some children may require some additional support through small group teaching or specific interventions such as speech and language therapy or emotional support. Others may need some additional time with an adult in school, specialist equipment or a more bespoke curriculum. The school can also request support from specialist education and health services, for example, educational psychology advisory teachers, or speech and language therapy.
The school should work together with the parent and pupil to identify needs, and agree the outcomes, actions and support to be in place to meet these needs. A record of this should be shared with the parents. This may be through a school SEN support plan.
Once the plan has been agreed upon, your child’s teacher will work with teaching assistants or specialist staff to put it into action. They will make sure everyone is aware of your child’s needs and the plan’s aims, and will continually consider how helpful the support is.
You should meet with your child’s teacher each term (in addition to parent’s evenings) to discuss how effective the support has been, review progress and adapt the plan if necessary, for example, if your child’s needs have changed, or the support needs to change because they’re not making reasonable progress or you’re unhappy with the support.
This continual cycle of ‘assess, plan, do, review’ helps make sure that the support is working. It’s known as the graduated approach.
Devon’s graduated response
The Devon graduated response to SEND is a tool that can be used to support teachers and SENCos to identify, assess and record the needs of children and young people requiring special educational provision. It supports the planning and recording of appropriate provision and provides guidance for reviewing progress. It has been designed to help educational settings meet their duties as outlined in the SEND Code of Practice.
The graduated response aims to ensure the foundation levels of support are effectively implemented before moving a child onto higher levels of support.
There are three levels of SEND provision within the graduated response and your school will discuss your child’s level with you.
Ordinarily Available Inclusive Education
This is the support offered to all children and young people to help them progress in school, including those who may need a bit more support.
- Simple changes are put in place, such as reviewing teaching methods, or the learning environment.
- Reasonable adjustments (changes) are made to whole school policies, for example, changes to uniform, behaviour or homework policies, so the child or young person has greater success.
- Individual goals for improvement are identified and reviewed regularly to ensure they are appropriate to pupils’ needs.
Ordinarily Available Targeted Support
Additional ‘targeted’ support is sometimes needed where children and young people need more personalised and planned support to enable them to make progress. This includes those who have been identified as having SEND.
- The school should agree outcomes, actions and support needed with the pupil and parents.
- ‘Evidence-based’ (proven) methods are used to help students, based on their specific identified needs. This may be support given in groups or individually.
- Progress of how well methods being used are working is reviewed, and recorded, to help decisions about whether they should be continued.
- Additional support and advice may sometimes be provided by external teams, for example Educational psychologists, school nurses, communication and interaction team).
Specialist Support
For some children and young people specialist help and support may be needed. Pupils may have life-long learning difficulties or disabilities, across several areas of development, and will require more specialist intervention.
- A pupil has significant and persistent learning difficulties despite access to appropriate learning opportunities and support.
- External expertise and advice is needed to support the school to meet the pupil’s needs.
- An education, health and care (EHC) plan may be in place, so that extra care and support can be provided.