SEND Information Report
Special Educational Needs Information for Parents & Carers
How do we Support children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities?
At Garrett Hall Primary School we are committed to ensuring equality of education and opportunity for all our pupils including those with special educational needs and disability. We will make reasonable adjustments to ensure that the curriculum, environment and all information is as accessible as possible. We offer a range of strategies to support children with special educational needs and disabilities. Whatever the difficulty or need we endeavour to enable your child to achieve their educational potential by identifying and providing the most appropriate support available. This support may be offered as individual or small group support on a daily, weekly or other basis. This will be decided on each individual’s merits and will take into consideration the individual’s needs, classroom situation and personal targets. We are also an Accredited Dyslexia School and are currently working towards Wigan’s Mental Health Standards.
Classroom Support
Many children benefit from differentiated tasks within the classroom, to enable them to access the curriculum. In this way children will study the same topics but may complete different types or styles of tasks relating to the same learning outcomes. The task may also differ in the type of resources and equipment it involves, the work may be of a lower or greater level of complexity and in some cases may involve working with a partner or an adult.
Group Support
We offer a number of groups that a child with special educational needs may have access to during school time. Some of these groups will operate within the classroom under the leadership of a classroom assistant; others may take place elsewhere in the school.The group work is designed to address your child’s areas for development, personal targets and complement their learning experiences within the classroom.
Examples of group support include: Nurture Group, Speech and Language Group, Dyslexia Groups, Booster Groups,Social Skills, Managing Emotions and Self-esteem, COOL, Intensive literacy support, Units of Sound, Toe by Toe, Extra Phonics work etc.
Individual Support
For some support programmes children may need periods of one to one intervention during school time. These may include Speech and Language Therapy, Counselling, Mentoring, Behaviour Management, Better reading, Arrow. We also have a trained dyslexia teacher working in school part time.
Voluntary Support
In school we have a number of parents who come into school to help with a variety of activities some of which include listening to readers and helping in the classroom, If you would like to get more involved in helping at school please contact us, either at the office or through your child’s class teacher, we would love to hear from you. As part of our safeguarding procedures all volunteers in school will be required to have a DBS check before they can work with children.
Who provides children with extra support in school?
School employ a number of extra teachers/ teaching assistants to assist children further in the classroom and provide interventions in school.
These include:
Mrs Hughes - Learning Mentor
Mrs Rowland - Dyslexia Teacher.
Miss Burns – Upper Junior Support teacher
Mrs Tonge – Nurture Lead/HLTA
Mrs Roscoe/Mrs Greenhalgh - Reading/Spelling/Numeracy Support
Mrs McCarty - Speech and Language/Nurture
On occasion we may feel that your child might benefit from the support and advice of other professionals who have specialist training in particular fields. Here are some of the agencies that we can approach to help us to support your child:
Educational Psychologist (EPS)
Wigan Family Welfare – school counselling.
Speech and Language Therapists (SALT)
School Nurse
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS)
Wigan Targeted Educational Support Services
Children and Young Peoples Service
Gateway – support for families
How do we assess our pupils?
All children in our school undergo frequent assessments to inform us of their progress and to enable us to make decisions about how we can support all our children; and particularly those who may have individual needs.
An example of the range of assessments we may administer to provide us with an overview of your child’s needs are:
teacher level assessments, Numeracy and Literacy optional SATs, end of Key Stage SATs, Single word reading and spelling test, phonics screening Non-Word Decoding Test, Ravens Coloured Matrices, British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS), Dyslexia Portfolio, Boxall Profile, Connors questionnaires.