What is SEN Support?

The SEN Support Toolkit explains the responsibilities on early years providers, schools and post 16 providers for meeting the special educational needs of children and young people. The toolkit also includes guidance on many of the SEND processes that educational providers must follow.

You can find out more about the SEN Support Toolkit here.

SEN support could include teaching differently or help from an extra adult. Sometimes your child may get help from a specialist such as:

• Educational psychologists (qualified professionals registered with the Health Care Professional Council working within the education system and the community to promote the emotional wellbeing of children and young people)

• Child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS)

• Specialist teaching and learning serivces or SEND support services (eg teachers qualified to work with specific needs such as visual impairment, hearing impairment, communication problems etc)

• Therapists such as speech therapists or occupational therapists.

• Hearing and visual impairment: the school can seek advice direct from the Sensory Impairment Service.

The four stages of SEN support are:

• Assess

• Plan

• Do

• Review.

Assess:

Your child’s difficulties must be assessed so that the right support can be provided. This should include, for example, asking you what you think, talking to professionals who work with your child (such as their teacher), and looking at records and other information. This needs to be reviewed regularly so that the support provided continues to meet your child’s needs. That might mean getting advice and further assessment from someone like an educational psychologist, a specialist teacher or a health professional.

Plan:

Your school or other setting needs to agree, with your involvement, the outcomes that the SEN support is intended to achieve – in other words, how your child will benefit from any support they get – and you need to be involved with that. All those involved will need to have a say in deciding what kind of support will be provided, and decide a date by which they will review this so that they can check to see how well the support is working and whether the outcomes have been or are being achieved.

Do:

The setting will put the planned support into place. The teacher remains responsible for working with your child on a daily basis, but the SENCO and any support staff or specialist teaching staff involved in providing support should work closely to track your child’s progress and check that the support is being effective.

Review:

The support your child receives should be reviewed at the time agreed in the plan. You can then decide together if the support is having a positive impact, whether the outcomes have been, or are being, achieved and if or how any changes should be made.

The school will review the SEN Support Plan regularly. The review will help identify whether your child's progressing and if the amount of support needs to change.

You and your child are central to deciding what action to take, what you want it to achieve and whether it's working.

The school must:

• work closely with you and your child to identify your child's needs and support

• take into account you and your child's concerns, views, agreed outcomes and next steps

• include you in any decision to involve specialists

• share details of the support plan with you and agree a review date

• ask you and your child for your views when reviewing the SEN support plan.