Special Educational Needs
The AlphaPlus team has experience of working within SEN and alternative provision settings across all phases of statutory education. We bring this to bear in the following ways.
Safeguarding
- inter-agency working with effective links to relevant agencies
- use of the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) - a multi-disciplinary plan to recognise SEN children’s additional needs and the systems in place to protect children from abuse or neglect and proactively safeguard the welfare of the child. The CAF specifies services for the child within the family
- support for the school or other setting with procedures, including written records of concern, liaison with other agencies and promoting integrated multi-agency working.
Disability equality
- full explanation of the statutory legal requirements
- support for the school to identify barriers to accessing and participating in learning and to produce an accessibility plan
- guidance on preparing an access plan in the context of a disability equality scheme and provide reasonable adjustments to ensure disabled pupils are not at a substantial disadvantage
- methods of assessing whether a setting is successful in developing accessibility as part of long term planning.
Procedures to share and spread best practice and expertise within a community of schools
- co-operative arrangements across local boundaries to share best practice
- the use of teachers from mainstream and specialist settings with teaching expertise and qualifications specific to SEN to provide advice and support
- the adoption of SEN provision mapping to audit a school’s provision for SEN and record use. This will be a sound basis for spreading good practice.
Approaches to raising attainment in SEN
We believe that the Green Paper ‘SEN and Disability’ (published in 2011 ) provides the foundation for raising attainment. The proposal for ‘a new single assessment process and ‘Education, Health and Care Plan’ by 2014 to replace the statutory SEN assessment and statement, bringing together the support on which children and their families rely across education, health and social care’ will be critical in this respect.
In support of the new single assessment process, other strategies for raising attainment will include
- good information for parents on the child’s progress and plans/interventions used to address their child’s SEN
- benchmarking current attainment
- recognising and identifying barriers to learning for SEN pupils using a graduated response based both on in-school expertise and external specialist services (educational psychologists, curriculum and behavioural support professionals, specialist and advisory teachers, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists and physiotherapists, school nurse etc.)
- early intervention following identification of needs
- setting realistic individual targets, recording mechanisms for primary interventions and monitoring of outcomes
- employment of a wide range of teaching and learning styles.
