We aim to identify a child’s needs as early as possible. It is rarely clear if a child has a Special Need that will be with them for their life, or will be able to catch up. Therefore Early Years identification of each child’s strengths is key to ensuring that children who have perhaps missed out on parts of their education can be given extra help to catch up, so that they can access mainstream education provision. In later years extra provision can then be targeted towards those children who seem to have on-going learning difficulties.
In the 2014 SEND Code of Practice the government say that school must inform parents when they are making special educational provision for a child.
At London Meed school we want to make sure that all of our pupils learn as much as they can whether or not they have any identified special needs or not. Children with identified Special Needs will be taught the National Curriculum, but it will be taught in a way that includes them and allows them to access learning. Children will be most effectively included where appropriate planning has been made in:
- what the child is expected to learn
- what teaching methods will be used
- ways of bypassing barriers to learning
At London Meed school a variety of assessment tools are used to discover and help provide for individual pupil’s needs. Formal assessment includes tests such as the Salford and the Suffolk reading test. We use the Phonological Assessment Battery ‘screener’ to help identify specific literacy difficulty. Checklist profiles enable us to sort apparently separate difficulties into patterns. In-class observation of provision and interval observation or children’s experience in class is also used. External specialists will also make observations and assessments of pupils. At London Meed we have a Special Provision map outlining possible routes for teachers to follow in escalating their support for pupils they see as experiencing difficulties.
https://westsussex.local-offer.org
Updated September 2022