Helping Your Child
The SEN Code of Practice emphasises the need for a "graduated approach" to meeting the special education needs of children. The actions taken should be organised so that progressively more intensive interventions, in range and type, can be used to meet increasing needs. In particular, the emphasis is to provide support that is additional to and different from the normal range of teaching strategies for pupils who need extra help.
The graduated approach to helping children with SEN
The SEN Code Of Practice (available to view on the TeacherNet website) suggests that the more flexible and responsive a teacher's strategies are, the more likely it is that pupils with a range of learning needs will make adequate progress.
There are three recommended phases:
School Action - where the needs of the child are met from within the resources of the mainstream school or early years setting with the advice of the schools’s SEN coordinator
School Action Plus - where the advice and support of external agencies (such as Inclusion Support or Speech and Language Therapy) is provided to support the work of school staff.
Statement of SEN - where the Local Authority has decided that the needs of the child cannot reasonably be provided for soley within the resources of a mainstream school or early education setting.
A graduated approach to supporting a child does not imply that interventions are a set of hurdles to be crossed before a statutory assessment can be made. The Code is clear that interventions are part of a cycle of planning, action and review within the school to enable all children to learn and progress.