Special Education Needs and Disabilities
SEND Statement of Intent
At Bridgemary School, we expect all children, including those with SEN and disabilities, to achieve and make progress in line with the achievements and progress of all other children within the school and those nationally. We intend that our curriculum supports our Trust ambition of ‘achieving more together’. It is also our intention as the SEND Department for our young people with additional needs to be able to ASPIRE through deliberately planning for, targeting and supporting their individual needs. This will be achieved by well-trained teachers and learning support assistants working collaboratively in order to be experts in the young people in their classrooms. Staff working with our young people with SEND will have continuous CPD, and LSAs will be knowledgeable about the curriculum and what it takes to achieve in specific subject areas. We want to build confident, resilient young learners who have good self-esteem and are engaged in their learning. In addition, we are committed to supporting our young people to become well-rounded individuals who feel that they are valued members of our community, able to be contributing members of society when they leave us. We will foster an ethos of equality and inclusivity in all areas of school life, including extracurricular activities and pupil leadership opportunities. We must develop an educational curriculum that equips our young people with the skills required for Post-16 learning and future employment and prepares them for adulthood. We will need to work closely with outside agencies, parents carers and other stakeholders to provide a cohesive approach to each young person’s progress.
The curriculum across all subjects is carefully sequenced so that prior core declarative and procedural knowledge is built upon, with continual opportunities for core knowledge to be interleaved throughout both key stages so that students know more, remember more and can apply that knowledge in a range of contexts. Facilitating knowledge adds important local, national, and global context to core knowledge, and our curriculum intends to provide a richness and diversity that enables our students to experience learning in real-life contexts.
The school curriculum is built on 4 aims to ensure our students receive and are able to access it fully, those being:
● Reading and comprehension that aims to ensure all students leave with a reading age at least equivalent to their chronological age
● Our school ethos of Be Kind, Work Hard, Be the Best Version of Yourself
● A deepening understanding of core and facilitating knowledge that enables students to know and remember more
● A wide appreciation of the world that we live in, and the celebration of the diversity this brings
In the SEND Department, we support these aims by enabling students to develop an understanding and use of terminology and commonalities in language between curriculum areas. They develop new skills through various interesting contexts to ensure engagement, improve their social and moral understanding of the world, and form reasoned opinions around historical and future developments. Our curriculum is built around core knowledge, and our lessons develop retrieval of information over time and enable the students to link this content to the world around them. The SEND department will facilitate interventions/lessons with a positive climate for learning in which students will feel safe to contribute and develop their knowledge. Students will be given the tools and knowledge required to appreciate and celebrate the diversity of their world.
To ensure any gaps in prior or new knowledge are quickly identified, we check progress frequently through a range of assessment opportunities, from lesson-by-lesson declarative knowledge tests end of topic tests that assess knowledge retention and application to more cumulative common assessments that assess students’ ability to remember and apply knowledge in a range of contexts. The information from these assessments is used to adapt the curriculums, intending to quickly close gaps in knowledge and keep students on track to achieve at our ambitious academic flightpaths. In addition, the SEND department aims to identify barriers to learning quickly and completes rigorous screening to identify additional needs and then plans interventions to address these. We work closely with outside agencies such as CAMHS to ensure that any referrals that are required are completed in a timely manner.
During their time in the SEND department, students are given numerous opportunities to expand their co-curriculum knowledge and experience cultural capital development opportunities. These include personal, social, physical, spiritual, moral and cultural aspects throughout numerous areas within our remit.
At Bridgemary School we expect all children, including those with SEN and disabilities, to achieve and make progress in line with the achievements and progress of all other children within the school; and those nationally.
The SEND Code of Practice says:
A child or young person has SEN if they have a learning difficulty or disability which calls for special educational provision to be made for him or her.
A child of compulsory school age or a young person has a learning difficulty or disability if he or she:
has significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of others of the same age, or
has a disability that prevents or hinders him or her from making use of facilities of a kind generally provided for others of the same age in mainstream schools.
A child under compulsory school age has special educational needs if he or she is likely to fall within the definition above when they reach compulsory school age or would do so if the special educational provision was not made for them.
There are four broad categories of SEND:
Communication and interaction – such as Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and Speech and Language difficulties.
Cognition and learning – such as Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and Moderate Learning Difficulties.
Social, emotional and mental health – such as ADHD, Attachment Disorders, emotional difficulties and mental health difficulties.
Physical and sensory – such as a physical disability that impairs learning, hearing impairments and visual impairments.