Special Educational Needs
Supporting Children with Special Educational Needs at Longhoughton
God has given each of us a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve each other. 1Peter 4:10-11
We are all different in a wonderful way. Our special talents and personalities need to be recognised, nurtured and celebrated. We all have our individual challenges and support needs to. By coming together to support each other, we create a rich community in which we can all succeed together.
Our school ethos is built on the premise that Everybody is Welcome, and that all pupils who join our school family should have the best support and opportunity to grow and develop that we can possibly offer. All of us are different, and have different challenges to learning that may relate to our experience, background or how we think about things. Our teaching and learning approaches recognise this: we value the importance of getting to know every child and what helps them to learn best so we can make the necessary adaptations and quickly identify any additional support needs to enable them to succeed with their learning.
We follow a graduated response to supporting children’s needs in school. The first stage is our universal Quality First Teaching offer. This describes the approaches and adaptations made within the classroom that are offered to all children to help them learn at their best. These approaches shape how teaching staff build strong relationships with their pupils that are integral to understanding what is special about each individual and what helps them to learn. They form the support strategies used to support children’s cognition and learning, sensory and physical, and communication and interaction needs. You can find more information about what this looks like in each class at the bottom of this page.
Some of our children face more pronounced or specific challenges with their learning. At the point it becomes clear they need more than our quality first teaching offer to enable them to progress alongside their peers, extra adaptations we can make specifically for them are identified. At this point they will be placed on our Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) register and a Pupil Passport will be written for them so that all teaching staff are aware of the specific strategies that enable that child needs in order to learn. For some children, a Support Plan will accompany the pupil passport. The support plan will detail long term goals the child is working towards, broken down in to smaller SMART targets. Progress towards these targets is reviewed every term and parents are given regular updates about this progress.
There are a few children who need profound adaptations made for them to be able to access learning in our school, which require specialist input. When it is clear that the steps so far described in our graduated response are not enough to enable a child to learn (for example, after three unsuccessful cycles of their support plan), then, working with parents, we would put together a Consideration Of Statutory Needs Assessment (COSA) to apply for an assessment as to whether an Education Health and Care Plan would be suitable.
You can find out more about the graduated response to supporting children with SEND by looking at the Northumberland Ordinarily Available Provision document below.