How can you support children with SEND?
This week’s spotlight is on Special Educational Needs, offering blogposts covering a range of learning difficulties found in the classroom. You can also practise your prioritising skills with our In Tray resource and find our workload and wellbeing health check in our top blogs of the week.
Top 5 blogs
- 5 Ways To Make Knowledge Stick – How can you prepare students for their exams?
- Workload and Wellbeing Checklist – How do you know if your school is genuinely reducing teacher workload?
- What Is Differentiation All About? – What does differentiation actually mean?
- 9 Teaching Ideas To Bin – What teaching ideas would you like to say goodbye to in 2018?
- 20 Years of Educational Fads – Over the past 20 years, what do you think teachers have wasted their time doing most?
Resource of the week
A common task in an interview, especially for a more senior role in schools, is an in-tray task. It will involve reviewing a list of tasks and prioritising and delegating the different items. One of our most popular resources is a practice in-tray exercise created by Ross Morrison McGill. Give it a go in preparation for your next interview, or to just generally practise your prioritising skills. The ‘how to’ blog is here, and you can download the resource here.
CPD Spotlight: Special Educational Needs
Most teachers will have a range of educational needs in their classroom and they’ll need to have at level of understanding of each type of special educational need and the best way to help those students. Here’s some information and guidance on some of the different learning difficulties that are often found in schools.
- How To Help Dyspraxic Learners
- Understanding Dyscalculia
- The Dyslexia Migraine
- Making Your Classroom Autism Friendly
From elsewhere
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Meet Alperton Community College teacher Andria Zafirakou – the winner of the Global Teacher Prize 2018, held in Dubai last weekend, and attended by team TT!
- Find out more about England’s top secondary school (and it is not in London) – Tauheedul Islam Girls’ High School.
- According to research by the Educational Policy Institute (EPI), the number of state secondary schools falling into deficit in England has almost trebled in the last four years to more than a quarter.
- Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister, attended All Saints Catholic College in Dukinfield, Greater Manchester, for the formal launch of Teach First’s two-year ‘Leading Together’ programme – which is funded through the Department for Education’s £75 million Teaching & Leadership Innovation Fund.
- The Video Standards Council bans from sale in the UK the PlayStation game Omega Labyrinth Z because it “promotes the sexualisation of children”.
- According to the Policy Exchange report Completing the Revolution, the 2014 national curriculum is at risk of failure because too few teachers have access to suitable classroom resources. The report highlights:
- Only 10% of teachers use textbooks in more than half their lessons, and even fewer expect to be doing so by 2020;
- Teachers have been trained to believe that they need to make as many of their own resources as possible, adding significantly to their workload;
- Many teachers rely too much on unregulated and free online resources, many of which are poor quality.
- Will Millard from LKMco says that without clarity as to its purpose, primary assessment will only sap teachers’ time and not tell us what we need to know.
- Schools could be stripped of cash to support pupils with serious physical and mental disabilities. The TES revealed that 12 parts of the country have been banned by the Department for Education from propping up high-needs funding with money taken from elsewhere in the schools budget.
- The following animation from the British Dyslexia Association seeks to preempt misconceptions among young audiences by shedding light on the real challenges dyslexic children face whilst also acknowledging their strengths and potential. In a previous blog, we have challenged whether dyslexia even exists – what do you think?
