Jules

About the Role of a SENCo The role of a Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCo) is always interesting and impossible to explain succinctly. Everyone has an idea about the role of a teacher but that’s only a small part of a SENCo’s job. The breadth of the role is specific to the school you are in and the needs of your children. Relationships are key to the role (as with teaching) but for a SENCo the reach is wider: you need to develop positive relationships with the children, staff, parents, outside agencies, governors, and leadership teams so that you can achieve and maintain support for children. In the early days I also learned that part of my role was to manage expectations for children, parents and professionals. At this point I have a big confession – I am a rescuer. If I can see a way of making things easier for someone, I will do it. This is how I became so interested in Special Needs. I was fascinated by how I could help this group of children to achieve, to discover their barriers and help to overcome them and to celebrate with them when they did well. However, as SENCo I soon realised people come from many directions. Some staff expected me to teach all the SEND children or to have interventions that removed them from class; some children expected me to be with them all the time and struggled to share that time with others; some parents expected their child to have every intervention possible and to get an EHCP. And I really don't like disappointing people. The biggest part of my job was to develop relationships with our whole school community, to be visible, and to chip away at misconceptions; to deliver workshops and CPD for all staff to explain our provision and my role within it; and all the while continuing to nurture those core relationships. As a rescuer, I find it challenging to maintain a strategic view, but this is a crucial part of the SENCo role. We need to have a clear vision for SEND children in our schools. This means having an overview of the interventions in place and their impact; monitoring progress of individuals; maintaining the SEND register so that we can target the interventions effectively; having oversight of the budget; planning professional development around SEND; providing progress data and analysis to the Local Authority and Governors (and OfSTED when they visit); keeping up to date with statutory paperwork and making all the necessary referrals; supporting teachers to implement programmes or recommendations from outside agencies; and developing consistent transition routines for our vulnerable children. It is a broad and varied role, which is why it is important to maintain that strategic view for your school. There are also the hands-on and practical elements: supporting colleagues with specific needs; ensuring the ‘assess, plan, do, review’ process is happening; working with parents and staff to make EHCP applications; responding within timescales to consultations; liaising with parents and providing support for parents; liaising with outside agencies; being in the playground to meet and greet children and provide soft starts to manage transitions; leading small interventions and assessments: maintaining the staff appraisals process for support staff; ensuring there are consistent visuals being used across the school; and providing SEMH support (THRIVE) for children and staff. Since 2014, SENCos are required to hold a professional MA level qualification, involving research and two academic papers, which I completed in March. That’s how my role looked before March 2020. What happened in Lockdown? In 48 hours, this was all turned on its head. Face to face relationships with outside agencies, each of them reeling from the changes, were now conducted at arm's-length through phone calls/ virtual meetings. These agencies took the opportunity to catch up on report writing and send them to me, and I learned how to ‘Zoom’ and ’Skype’ so that meetings with the Local Authority could still go ahead and new EHCPs could be issued. I phoned and emailed children and families, inviting them in as part of our vulnerable group and planning the additional support they would need. I completed risk assessments for children in school or at home and provided information to the Local Authority and DfE on which children were attending and what actions we were taking to encourage those who weren’t. I continued to write referrals and collated information on any Mental Health and Wellbeing support available to parents, posting it on our website and emailing it to families. I responded to emails from parents, many of whom were experiencing high anxiety and finding the situation very challenging, offering them daily support. I worked with SLT to coordinate the staff team effort to stay connected to our children using video and postcards. With some vulnerable and Key Worker children in school, we covered staff breaks, did the admin in the absence of office staff, staying open over the holidays so there was provision in place for the children who needed it. Parents, children, and staff were scared. My role was to reassure, to let them know ‘we are still here’ and offer consistent, calm support. As we welcomed more children back to school, I was involved in the planning of the additional safeguards, routines and signs for everyone to follow. We set up the school during the May half term to ensure everything was ready for the increasing number of children and staff on site. Our staff have been amazing, and my Head and Deputy have been strong and supportive in their relentless determination to do the best we can for our children. Our Deputy learned how to set up a blog for our school community and we all learned to ‘Loom’ to put the content on so children could see us and stay connected. The announcement of the wider opening brought its own challenges. It raised expectations of parents, who are living in challenging circumstances, with their SEND children at home. Despite everything we had done, some parents were frustrated when we couldn’t meet their expectations. Not all schools were able to open to Yr6, Yr1 and Reception and Nursery children and meet the social distancing guidelines. Some parents were anxious and didn’t want their children to attend, and some parents were simply exhausted and needed to vent. For many families, the pandemic has highlighted the lack of resources in SEND nationally and they needed someone to talk to. But there were some truly golden moments: children who flourished in the small group situation in school, parents who really appreciated how hard our staff were working; ‘Kindness photos’ sent in by families to cheer people up; sometimes just the cheery waves and smiles from everyone in school as they navigated the madness. September 2020 and beyond... Although it has been a steep learning curve, we were in a good position for September. We had to think creatively about our transition processes. We sent photos, inviting children (who weren’t attending) in after school to have a tour of the school and see all the changes and posting welcome videos from new teachers. More was done in the week before the children returned to nurture those relationships. Whole school opening brings its own risks because of the number of people on site. However, we have developed plans in line with guidance, including staggered starts, ends and breaks. Cleaning regimes were all in place for term 6 so this is becoming the norm for staff, and more children will become involved. It will be a team effort, and our whole school community will need to work together to keep each other safe. Communication will continue to be vital in managing the emotions of families, which range from thinking all the safeguards are ridiculous to wanting really strict safeguards in place. The most important part of welcoming our children back is making sure they feel safe. We know they won’t be able to learn without this. This is particularly important for our children with SEND who may communicate their fears in very different ways, and our team are alert to this and focused on wellbeing. Children need space to air their worries and experiences in their own way when they are ready. My team and I are in the playground in the mornings and provide soft starts for those who need it. I am also maintaining contact with children who are not able to return. We now have an established online system and we post weekly videos for those children based around THRIVE activities. Creativity and gratitude are so important to the recovery process for the whole school community. We have a real opportunity to continue to build on the relationships we had to nurture in different ways during lockdown. We know we can adapt and rise to the occasion. The Autumn term will be busy, but never dull!

Labels are certainly useful. Baking a chocolate cake would be slightly hazardous if we did not know which tin contained the cocoa powder and which one the gravy browning. The results could be deadly if the local pharmacy received all their drugs in unlabelled boxes. Labels can be very powerful, especially when linked to clever marketing. It always fascinates me that some young children who show no interest in text or any signs of readiness for reading can often recognise words such as McDonalds or Tesco. Labels can be dangerous. As adults we often trust sources of information when they have particular labels on them and this can lead to trouble when these labels are used by fraudsters. Labels can be mysterious. How often do we long to see what is behind the fence of an area labelled keep out? How much do we long to know the content of a letter or document which is marked strictly confidential? Labels can be life-saving. None of us would readily open a container labelled as hazardous waste. It keeps us safe to have a swimming pool labelled at points with its depth. Labels can be comforting. Many of us stick for years to the same tried and tested brands and panic when they are no longer available. It can raise our confidence levels at an event to be wearing a particular brand of clothing that we think suits us. Labels are, of course, linked to our use of language and are very influential. From professionally created brand names to the everyday use of adjectives, labels can shape how we use and think about things. Think about a street where two families live next door to a household with three large dogs. On one side the adults describe them as ‘lovely dogs’ and are happy to let their children stroke them and throw toys for them to retrieve. The neighbours on the other side have little experience of dogs and they tell their young children to keep away from the ‘scary dogs’. The young children of that family are nervous about walking past the house and cower when the dogs start barking. Both families are describing the same dogs, but the children will grow up with different views not just of their neighbours’ dogs, but very possibly of all dogs well into their lifetime. Labels, however, are not only applied to objects but very often are applied to people – sometimes by themselves and sometimes by others. Sometimes these labels are applied intentionally and sometimes unintentionally but they will influence how others perceive us and how we feel about ourselves. Labels can improve our self-confidence or can weigh us down with depressing baggage. Those of us who work with young children need to bear this in mind on a daily basis. Young children are impressionable and some of the ways we think about ourselves as children are extremely difficult to reframe as we get older. It is very easy to inadvertently label children as we speak to colleagues and, while we may not apply this labelling directly with children, it will impact the way we work as a team, communicating with them and their families. Whilst it is important to be careful about the language we use with and in front of children, we are also in a position where we can encourage them to take on positive labels for themselves and discourage them from taking on board the negative. As children we would recite the old adage, ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me’, but I think we all realised, deep down, that this was not true. It is misleading and we should never under-estimate the effect that words can have. One of the labels that I carried around for a very long time was ‘accident prone’. It still follows me today, just a few weeks ago on a family walk my mother was trying to make my son feel better about breaking something by telling him how many cups and glasses I broke as a child. As I developed through adulthood I gradually began to realise that this was something that did not really define me. The label had led to the idea becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. I began to understand that small accidents and incidents that would have been forgotten if they happened to someone else began to become part of my story and narrative that backed up the ‘clumsy’ label. As an educationalist I came to understand that all children can have periods of clumsiness as they grow and develop through different phases. As an adult I wasn’t particularly prone to breaking things and could work, decorate, sew and play sports with adequate control and dexterity. I would like to point out that this label was never applied to me in a cruel way and was part of humorous family conversations. However, I do think that on reflection, there are things that I am slightly hesitant about carrying out and things I am nervous about handling because of the long term impact of being labelled ‘accident prone’. On the other hand, there have been times when I have used this part of my narrative to my advantage in training or social situations. When I have needed an amusing anecdote about myself, it has come in handy to quickly be able to recall when I fell in a coal hole, almost sunk a boat and accidently drilled a hole in the classroom table! I am concerned at some of the labels that are being used for children and young people in the current crisis. I am worried that being described as the “Covid generation’, the generation who need to ‘catch up’, or the group who ‘missed school’ will impact on how they perceive themselves as learners. I am not saying that the pandemic has not had a detrimental impact on the education of our young, but I am certain that, with the right support, the experience of these past few months does not need to define who they are and what they can achieve. We somehow need to help them to look at what potential they have and not focus solely on what they have missed. We need to find a rhetoric which motivates them to identify and seize the possibilities and opportunities in life. Using appropriate labels to describe groups of children and learners has always been problematic, precisely because we want to avoid a situation where it leads to them feeling like they have failed in some way or are not as successful as others in their peer group. Terms such as ‘remedial’ and ‘lower set’ have been replaced with phrases such as ‘catch up’, ‘closing the gap’ and ‘support groups’. Nonetheless, I think we need to ask ourselves constantly whether the language we are using is still suitable. In the early years many of us have used the term ‘emerging’ rather than ‘below expected’ because it feels kinder and indicates that progress is being made. However, after a while any phrase begins to carry with it connotations, and we need to re-evaluate the words we use on a regular basis. In my view, the standards agenda that has been prominent in our education system has led to an increase in negative labelling. Testing and measuring at the level that currently happens encourages competition and leaves us trying to find ways to describe those who are reaching goals and those who are not. As the EYFS undergoes reform, I very much welcome the move back to trusting professional judgement and the move away from reliance on data driven assessment. This will take time to embed, and practitioners will need opportunities for excellent professional development to build both their understanding of child development and confidence in their own judgements. It is my great hope that the early years sector will become awash with professionals who are experts in observational assessment and who are able to identify the amazing things that all children can do. On reflection, whilst the use of appropriate and positive language matters greatly, it is not going to make a difference on its own. With a real change of viewpoint and approach we can give all children the support needed to achieve, not by looking at what they can’t do, but by looking at each individual and recognising their differing strengths and starting points. We can then build on what children know and introduce them to new ideas, skills and knowledge in a timely manner which is appropriate to their own rate of growth and development. Surely, this could put us in a position where we are not spending as much effort struggling to find words or phrases to label those who do not meet the requirements of the standard norm and instead dedicate that time to truly enriching the lives and educational experience of this ‘covid capable-generation’. Leslie Patterson Educational Consultant Finding the Magic in the Early Years

What are the Cherry Garden Branch Maps? A new assessment tool developed by the namesake school (an outstanding specialist school in London for children with severe and complex support needs). The maps organise key milestones that you would expect to find in a typically developing child from birth to 5 years, with additional bridging branch maps for a level expected in Year 1. The aim is to provide practitioners with a straightforward overview of a child’s current level and support them to set appropriate next steps. What makes them different to existing assessment models? The maps are intended to be child-centred documents that allow for a flexible approach to assessment – moving away from previous models where the expectation would be that a child makes typical ‘linear’ progress. A child’s learning journey can follow its own unique path, and the straightforward organisation of milestones means that adults can see if a child has missed a key step that is holding them back from moving forward. How can using the Branch Maps enhance parental engagement? Cherry Garden School’s initial concept for their assessment system was for an interactive Cherry Orchard that parents/carers could explore to investigate the learning of their child. Once they had completed the writing of the developmental documents, they joined forces with Tapestry to make this idea a reality. Tapestry have brought the concept to life, creating an attractive, interactive orchard that shows multimedia evidence of a child’s learning. How does the Cherry Orchard show progress to parents? There are two key visualisations in the Orchard. For a child whose support needs are less complex/severe, their cherry tree grows and leaves are added as they secure understanding. A parent can click on leaves to see evidence of learning. The tool allows a user to take snapshots at any time to make comparisons in the future. A child will have their own learning tree for each main curriculum area. What about progress for children with the most profound needs? The second visualisation type in the Orchard is a flower. The flower’s interactive petals grow as a child gains understanding, but they also deepen in colour as a child generalises skills. It is important for learners with the most significant support needs that we celebrate this ‘lateral’ progress and help parents to understand the learning that has taken place. A parent can click on a petal to see evidence of learning. Summary The Cherry Garden Branch Maps from Tapestry provide schools with a child centred, flexible approach to assessing children with learning differences, which is proven to enhance parental engagement in a child’s learning. They: · Provide teachers/support staff with key milestones in typically developing young children. · Demonstrate not only linear but also lateral progress – perfect for children with complex support needs. · Enable parents to explore and understand their child’s learning through a unique Cherry Orchard visualisation. If you are a setting that uses Tapestry then you can enable the Cherry Garden framework by following this tutorial. There are also tutorials on the Cherry Garden Orchard, Strand Scores, Cherry Garden Term Progress, and Cherry Garden Targets Progress. For any further tutorials, take a look at our Tutorials Page. You can download the Branch Maps free of charge from the links below: The branch maps must not be used for commercial purposes or included in digital software other than Tapestry. Copyright remains with Cherry Garden School and The Foundation Stage Forum. PSED Branch Map Feb 2022.pd CLL Branch Map Feb 22.pdf CLL and English Bridging Map Feb 2022.pdf MD Branch Map Feb 22.pdf Mathematical Development Bridging Map Feb 2022.pdf PD Branch Map Feb 2022.pdf UW Branch Map Feb 2022.pdf EAD Branch Map Feb 2022.pdf Communication Book Branch Map Feb 2022.pdf Symbol Exchange Branch Map Feb 2022.pdf Transition Branch Map Feb 2022.pdf This document shows how the Branch Maps correlate with the EYFS and P Scales: Cherry Garden Branch Map Assessments Conversions.docx