Many children during their school life encounter difficulties, either of a general nature or with one or more specific areas of the curriculum. The school will use a range of strategies to remove these difficulties or barriers to learning. Pupils who continue to have difficulties in learning may have an Additional or Special Educational Need which the school can support through the use of inclusive teaching and specialist teaching services. An addition educational need may be in learning, communication interaction, physical and/or sensory and social, emotional, social or mental health difficulties.

At South Avenue Primary School, every child matters and we aim to ensure every child succeeds. We have well developed monitoring systems that assess and track all children’s progress. This ensures that barriers to learning are identified by indicators. The school has an Inclusion Leader and SENCo, as part of the Well-being Team. They work closely with class teachers and teaching assistants to plan appropriate levels of support to meet the needs of the children identified as having additional needs. Should your child be identified as having additional needs, your child will be included on the School’s Additional/Special Educational Needs Register, in line with the SEN Code of Practice 2014. The School will then work with you to identify appropriate support.

Arrangements for pupils with Physical or Sensory Impairment

Parents of disabled children are asked to give the Headteacher details of the disability as soon as a place is offered. This is to enable any necessary arrangements to be made to enable the child to participate as fully as possible in all lessons and activities.

Please see the link below for a full detailed account of what we can do at South Avenue to support and monitor your child if they have any special educational needs or disabilities.

Our aims and objectives:

Aims

• To identify at the earliest opportunity all children who need special consideration to support their physical, sensory, social, emotional, communicational or cognitive development.
• To ensure that these children are given appropriate support to allow every child full access to the National Curriculum in a positive framework.
• To ensure that these children are fully included in all activities of the school in order to promote the highest level of achievement.
• To involve parents, pupils and others in developing a partnership of support, enabling them full confidence in the strategy as adopted by the school.

Objectives

• To provide a broad, balanced and suitably differentiated curriculum relevant to pupil needs, through all staff sharing responsibility for SEN.
• To demonstrate that meeting the needs of children’s learning and/or behaviour is part of high quality mainstream education.
• To plan for any pupil who may at some time in their education have special educational needs.
• To promote self-worth and enthusiasm by encouraging independent learning at all ages.
• To give every child entitlement to a sense of achievement.
• To identify, monitor and support pupils who will need extra resources and/or teaching help as early as possible.
• To work in partnership with the child’s parents and other external agencies to provide for the child’s special educational needs.
• To regularly review the policy and practical arrangements to achieve best value.

What should I do if I think my child may have Special Educational Needs or a disability?

At South Avenue Primary School we would encourage you initially to talk to the class teachers about your concerns. This meeting will be recorded on a contact form and a copy given to the SENCo.  All staff can be contacted through the school office either by letter, email or a phone call. A request to meet with the class teacher can also be made through a note in your child’s reading diary or home communication book.

Some parents prefer to share concerns with Mrs Telford, our Well-being and Safeguarding Lead or Mrs Lofts, our Family Liaison Officer, who can both meet with you and arrange follow-up meetings. Both can be contacted through the school offices.

If you have a high level of concern about your child or information from either health professionals or private consultations then you may wish to talk to Mr Savva, our SENDCo, who can be contacted via our school office or via email at [email protected]. Mr Savva will meet with you and put in place the relevant response as seen on the flow chart. This may be in school support/monitoring or possibly fast track to requests for outside assessments and support.

Click to download the documents below for more information.