When you’re waiting for support for a child with additional needs, that wait can seem endless.
So many families are in this position at the moment - waiting for an autism diagnosis, a dyslexia screening or an education, health and care plan (EHCP). That’s why it’s critical to be able to provide school-level support before, as well as after, a referral.
If teachers have the strategies to deliver early help, it makes all the difference to a child’s life chances. But they can only do this if they have the expertise to help.
This is why our trust, with a team of 30 special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) teachers and teaching assistants attached to a specialist multi-academy trust, has grown rapidly to meet the rising demand for support in our area and beyond. We have a desire to ensure that we can support as many young people as possible.
SEND support outreach
We were initially a small team attached to a primary special school in Bolton. When the school became part of Woodbridge Trust, along with a secondary school and a college, the range of needs grew and the waiting lists got longer. We soon found ourselves supporting young people from the age of 2 up to 25.
With an increasing number of children in the area needing additional support, we actively looked for opportunities to extend our reach. With funding from the local authority as well as Woodbridge Trust, we started providing specialist services to mainstream schools in the area.
In addition to this, schools from outside the local authority can buy in services from us, such as screening for dyslexia or Irlen syndrome, and support for inclusive practice.
This additional funding gives us the resources we need to reach more schools and support more children. It means that in total we have engaged with more than 120 schools across our region and beyond.
Not only is there a higher incidence of children with additional needs in the country as a whole, there’s also a wider range of SEND needs than ever before.
This means plans and interventions have to be increasingly personalised to the child, and the only way to make that happen is by spending time with them in the classroom.
Therefore to reach as many children as possible, our team aims to be in every school we support within the local authority once a fortnight.
For example, this might involve our specialist teachers focusing on communication skills by using symbols to engage children with varying abilities. Whether that’s demonstrating how to use Zones of Regulation to help a child talk about their feelings, implementing visual timetables to reduce day-to-day anxiety or making story time a more inclusive experience.
We also hold in-reach sessions where mainstream teachers visit our specialist settings to develop their practice.
Furthermore, getting out into other settings helps us to improve, too. For example, if we see an effective approach for developing social skills in an alternative provision, we’ll recommend it to a mainstream school where it would work well, too.
Collaboration with other trusts
At a time of crisis in SEND provision, there should be as few barriers as possible to collaboration outside of your trust or local authority.
But for this to happen, it’s important to have leadership backing. That’s where we are very fortunate because our CEO, Mike Sidebottom, has given us full backing.
“There’s a great deal of SEND expertise within the trust, but there’s no point having a trust if it keeps experts to itself. I’m in favour of our team sharing best practice in every way they can - it’s even written in our trust’s principles - to be open and connected, and actively seeking collaboration,” he says.
Responding to requests for support
With so much demand for SEND services right now, you also need an efficient process for triaging support. If a teacher or Sendco refers one of their pupils to us, we’ll see them within a two-week window, because parents desperately need to know support is on its way.
If a child needs an EHCP, which can often take time to set up, we can’t afford to sit and wait for it. This is why we’ve introduced the concept of “waiting well”, meaning that while all the calls and emails are happening in the background, the school has interventions it can put in place straight away.
It’s a challenging time for families with a SEND need. But by sharing best practice on a broader scale, such as the implementation of communication tactics tailored to a child’s needs, this opens up more opportunities to work together - reaching far more children in need of help, in far less time.
Cate Marsden is director of external partnerships at Woodbridge Trust in Bolton
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