Reply To: Quality First Teaching ideas

[Dawn]

I’ve worked in mainstream and SEN schools and having a toolkit in every room is a great way to ensure pupils have everything they need. All of our pupils who require overlays, grips, etc have them in their planner and pencilcase but organisation problems are connected to many needs…so you can’t rely on them actually having the correct items. Knowing that each room has a small tray with everything in generally makes pupils more confident, less anxious and more independent as they can go and collect what they need as they enter the room. It is less conspicuous this way, if they have social anxieties surrounding their need. I have known pupils to try to ‘cover’ the fact that they can’t read the text for a whole lesson as they didn’t want to raise their hand and ask for an overlay in front of their peers when they had lost theirs.
Of course, this can also help teachers if they are not always using one room. But be mindful that you will need one ‘owner’ for each room to check the tray and resupply it when things go wandering, as they will… Having a ‘found this’ tray in the staffroom will help you to regather migrating items more quickly, too. You can’t be solely responsible – it would be an endless hunting and restocking task!

Good training on this and regular updates in twilights will be needed to get all staff on-board. See if you can get a local SEN school to liase and maybe offer training on their site on a CPD day so staff can see how it can work. With your pupil passports – make sure all staff are adding to the ‘what works well’ section at least termly so that you build a really good bank of resources and make all staff feel involved. If they see it as an ‘everybody contributes, everybody gains’ process, it will embed and continue. If not, it may fizzle out after a term or so.