SEND in schools
How schools support children with special educational needs
All schools, colleges and early years settings have a duty to meet the needs of children with special educational needs or disabilities and will make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for children with disabilities to make sure that they have the right support.
All schools have to tell you how they work to identify children with special educational needs and how they will support these children. You will be able to find this information on each school’s website, and it might be called the school’s SEN Information Offer.
Your school will also have a person called a Special Educational Needs Coordinator or SENCO, who will be your main point of contact.
Often mainstream schools can offer extra facilities, such as visiting teachers, to support your child. Some have additional resources for children with communication and interaction needs, speech, language and communication needs and hearing impairment.
Haringey Council’s School Improvement and Inclusion Service supports the work of Haringey’s schools, helping to support teaching and learning as well as leadership and management.
We expect all mainstream schools to:
- identify children and young people with special educational needs quickly and accurately so that support can be put in place
- notify parents whenever they have identified that their child or young person has a special educational need and the school is making additional provision for their child and give them access to independent information, advice and support
- make sure teachers have the skills to teach children and young people with a diverse range of needs
- focus on the quality of teaching for all children and develop different approaches to meet the needs of individual children and young people
- meet the needs and objectives identified in an Education, Health and Care Plan for children and young people with additional needs
- have a regularly reviewed special educational needs and disabilities policy, which is distributed to all parents of children with additional needs
- work in partnership with children, young people and their parents
- delegate resources fairly, efficiently and in response to identified need
All teachers will teach children with special educational needs, and all schools offer training for teachers to make sure they can meet the needs of pupils who need additional support. Some teachers also have specialist qualifications.
The SENCO works with teachers to make sure they understand how to adjust their teaching.
When a teacher plans a lesson they pay attention to the different needs of children in the class. For example they may give pupils different tasks to do in the lesson. Sometimes children who need extra help will work in a smaller group, or follow a slightly different learning programme for a short time. They may also use special equipment to help learning. The school will involve you in planning your child’s learning.
See also:
- Government information explaining the different types of schools (external link)
- More information about how schools must make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for disabled children (external link)
- Haringey Council Accessibility Strategy (Word, 64KB)
- Specialist teams
- SEND support guidance
- How your nursery, school or college should help (external link)
- What does SEN Support in school mean? (external link)
- What does SEN Support in post-16 education mean? (external link)
- What steps must the nursery, school or college take to support a child or young person with SEN? (external link)