Promoting positive practices with children with special educational needs and disabilities (England)
Early education and care professionals have a responsibility to provide the best start in life for every child. Children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) have the right to experience an engaging, inclusive and supportive early education and care provision that caters to their individual needs and supports them to thrive.
In this article, we'll explore the value of celebrating positivity around SEND, celebrating individuality and how we promote this positive practice for working with children with SEND in early education and care.
What is SEND?
Children with SEND might have a cognitive learning difference, a physical disability, a mental health need or processing delay. These can have a significant impact on a child’s access to appropriate and high quality education.
The SEND Code of Practice (2015) breaks SEND into four broad areas of need. These areas focus on the support needed rather than diagnosis.
Communication and interaction
Communication and interaction relates to speech and language needs, which might relate to difficulty communicating through speech or understanding social rules of communication.
Cognition and learning
Children with learning differences might need further accommodations to support learning, including different formats, pace and means. This area relates to specific needs due to conditions such as dyslexia, dyscalculia or dyspraxia, as well as broader learning differences and needs that impact how a child learns.
Social, emotional and mental health needs
This refers to mental health needs as well as emotional and social behaviours that might require additional support. For some children, this behaviour can be internalised whilst others might act in a way that affects other children too. Conditions such as anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, attachment disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder might all manifest in social and emotional behaviours that require additional and specific support.
Sensory and physical needs
Physical disabilities should also be considered within SEND when they “prevent or hinder them (children) from making use of the educational facilities generally provided”. This area includes children with hearing impairment, visual impairment, and children who seek or avoid sensory input as well as children with physical disability This could mean they require ongoing accommodations for sensory impairments that impact access to the current learning environment.
It’s not only valuable but essential to practice that we understand our duties when working with children with SEND to give every child the best start in life and build positive attitudes towards education and learning from their first experience. Despite best intentions, sometimes practice falls short of best when it comes to providing quality education and care for all. But, there are small changes we can make to our everyday practice that have a big impact on the children we work with.
Putting positive promotion in practice
Let’s have a look at some of the ways we can continue to improve the experiences of children with SEND in early education and care.
'Bad' behaviour
Challenging behaviour, disruptive behaviour, tricky behaviour are all phrases that are often associated with children with SEND. Remember: for children, their behaviour is a vital means of communication so if a child is shouting and screaming, we should be thinking about what we can do to support them in communicating their need.
Language used around these forms of communication vary but our reactions and responses must be positive and supportive when children are dysregulated. rather than framing it as a disruption or inconvenience: spilling the milk at breakfast is an inconvenience – having a child dysregulated (the inability to safely navigate emotions) because of an unmet need is not. Refrain from using terms such as ‘meltdown’ and ‘tantrum’ when talking about dysregulation due to their negative connotations that reinforce the old-fashioned idea of children with SEND being ‘naughty.’ Terms such as ‘overload’ are commonly accepted because they express the overwhelm that often causes distressed behaviours. Any terminology used should be considered with the child and family's preferences at the forefront.
This is how it might look like:
When a child is upset and struggling to regulate their emotions, we should ask ourselves "what does the child need that we are not currently providing?" It’s important to consider behaviour from children’s perspective to keep children at the heart of every action we take and decision we make.
Don't diagnose
Labelling children throughout their education life is an established theory within the sociology of schooling. It’s something we know can have a lifelong detrimental impact on children who are labelled negatively. Children with SEND are often faced with this reality through the diagnostic process. As waiting list times increase, schools are facing even greater challenges to provide effective support for children who do not yet have an official diagnosis, meaning funding is unavailable and needs are not met sufficiently.
Early education and care provisions have a responsibility to recognise when additional support is needed and to involve multi-agency partnerships for further referrals if needed. But, whilst this plays an important part in getting first steps in place, children should not be referred to as having a condition before diagnosis takes place because we are not able to make those assumptions and diagnose children ourselves. Our observations should be objective based on what we see, rather than attaching diagnoses to what we notice. We can put provisions in place that make a provision accessible and inclusive for the child, but we do not need a diagnosis to do that – it should be part of our standard best practice to be as accessible as possible.
This is how it might look like:
“John is a lovely boy in our toddler room who is always keen to help others but sometimes struggles to recognise when his friends need some quiet time to themselves” rather than “John is a lovely boy in our toddler room who struggles to recognise social cues and regularly exhibits traits of autistic spectrum condition”
Teach empathy and understanding
When children become dysregulated, it is often due to becoming overstimulated in busy environments with others around. Sometimes, these overloads can be significant and draw the attention of others in the room. Children are naturally inquisitive and will sometimes ask questions that might appear to be inappropriate but are well-intended so it’s important that we address questions and concerns from children with an open and empathetic approach to help them to understand other people’s differences and needs too.
This is how it might look like:
“Everybody is unique and our differences make us who we are. Some of us like loud music and busy play, but some of our friends might struggle with that. It’s important that we think about how everyone feels and do everything we can to make everybody feel welcome and safe in our space". By being open and honest about supporting children with SEND, we are enriching all children’s experiences to give them valuable opportunities to understand difference, accept diversity and embrace inclusion.
Making a difference for all
The need to support children with SEND is not new but our approaches are constantly changing to make the early education and care provisions we provide even better for every child to thrive in. Since the pandemic, children with SEND have faced further long-standing barriers to accessing equal educational opportunities. It’s vital that we play our part as professionals in early education and care to work with parents and carers to support children with SEND from their earliest interactions with education.
Explore our inclusive education resources for further advice and guidance on improving practice for children with SEND.
