High Expectations and 'Scaffolding Up' for students with SEND

Back in February 2021, I saw @says_miss tweet this piece of Mary Myatt wisdom:

It resonated with me because high expectations of SEND pupils is something that is a real passion of mine as someone who has spent the majority of my career in mainstream but is now the Head of a special school which is situated right in the centre of the spectrum of school provision. I'm thoroughly engaged with the mission that SEND students shouldn't feel patronised by their education and I want my pupils to look back on their school years with pride and be able to participate in the same conversations/reminiscing about what they studied a school with their neurotypical peers.

At the time I was teaching Much Ado About Nothing to Year 7 - mostly via the VLE and remote lessons, which was an additional challenge I hadn't anticipated when we mapped out the big picture plan for the KS3 English curriculum which has the stuy of a full Shakespeare play every year (The Tempest or Much Ado in Y7, A Midsummer Night's Dream in Y8 and Romeo and Juliet in Y9, followed by Macbeth for IGCSE coursework).

I felt I had a lot of tangible, practical examples of how I scaffold pupils to engage at a high level with a challenging text so I wrote this thread. You can read it, and see screenshots of the slides, pupil work and a link to a folder of the resources all here.

Scaffolding Up - @ralston_h thread

Since then, I've recorded a CPD video with Mary Myatt discussing the approach in more detail - you can watch it in her Myatt & Co video library here.

I've also published a number of other threads with resources and approaches to tackling challenging material with SEND pupils. I've collated them all on the tab above.