Reply To: How to reach out to parents

[Niki]

I agree it might be cultural – we had many children at my last school with SEN whose parents did not wish to accept this for exactly that reason. One child’s mum told me she had been ostracised in her local religious centre because of his SEN.

I also agree that discussing whether the same issues occur at home is an important part of the picture and a good way to get parents talking.

As a teacher in a speech and language Centre I led many parents down the path of accepting their child’s needs or understanding that they couldn’t be ‘fixed’, just taught strategies to help. I found it’s best to be very clear and honest. I would say “x is working y amount below expectation for age, but the good news is that with extra help has/could made z amount of progress”. I also used to say that even with help, the reasons they are not learning have not gone away – so progress over time for children with no difficulties will look like this (steep upward curve) and his progress might look like this (shallow curve) and the gap might actually get bigger over time – but we’re doing everything we can to keep it as small as possible…
Now I’m back in mainstream I might add “… and without your support, I can’t apply for funding to put the ‘best chance of success’ support in place.. .”

I do also have to broach the “have t
You thought about the next placement? Because although we can support and meet needs here, we feel a specialist school might be more appropriate setiing moving on vecause kf the increased demands of the cuuriculum, and would like to apply for an EHCNA…” conversation.

Right now I have a child in nursery with rigid behaviours and unintelligible speech whose mum isn’t hearing what we’re saying and thinks being a dinosaur all day is cute and the speech isn’t a problem. I’ve explained that 85% of kids with speech difficulty age 5 have literacy difficulties age 16, but we’re still not getting through – yet!! We will keep chipping away at it!