Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

Bayards Hill welcomes and provides for children and young people with a range of educational needs, including those with:

• Communication and Interaction- speech, language and communication needs, Autism Spectrum Condition including Aspergers and Autism.
• Cognition and Learning- moderate non-specific learning difficulties (difficulties in more than one area/subject, and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia, dyspraxia or dyscalculia.
• Social, Emotional and Mental Health difficulties- behaviour reflecting underlying mental health or emotional difficulties, attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, attachment disorder.
• Sensory and/or Physical Needs- hearing , visual or multi-sensory impairments or physical disability.

SEND provision is additional to and different to what is provided as part of Bayards Hill's inclusive, personalised and differentiated curriculum.

This provision is recorded on an individual Pupil Profile for each child with special educational needs and disabilities. 

• When a child is identified as needing SEND support, Bayards Hill employs a graduated approach of Assess-Plan-Do-Review  adopting the recommended model for special needs set out in the SEND Code of Practice (DfE 2015). The local authority SEND guidance is used as a guide for the identification, assessment and provision for SEND, and the forms provided are used for record-keeping. A register of pupils with SEND is kept as a legal requirement.
• Identifying an SEND may be due to parental concern, low entry profile, lack of progress despite receiving a differentiated curriculum, low achievement, requiring greater attention in class due to behavioural or learning difficulties, or requiring specialist material or equipment or support for sensory/physical problems.
• Children’s progress is assessed regularly by staff as part of the school tracking process. If progress is slow, speaking with parents and ensuring high quality targeted teaching is in place is the first step, accompanied by in-class interventions. If, after monitoring, there is still a concern the SENCo will work with the class teacher and phase leader to decide whether the child requires specialist provision using the Oxfordshire County Council Guidance. If specialist advice or support is deemed necessary, this will be organised by the SEND team
• In partnership with parents and carers and the child, our teachers will create a Pupil Profile, identifying desired outcomes and actions. These actions may include different teaching approaches, appropriate equipment, strategies within class and at home, as well as interventions to support the child’s progress.
• Outcomes and actions are reviewed regularly during the SEND Clinics, which are held with parents or carers and class teachers.
• If a child’s needs are not being met by additional, high quality special educational needs provision and the child has continued not to make expected progress, in conversation with specialists as well as parents, the school may consider requesting an Education, Health and Care assessment.

Watch an animation explaining the assessment process for Education, Health and Care Plans

Our school uses Oxfordshire County Council’s guidance “Identifying and supporting Special Educational Needs in Oxfordshire schools and settings”.

The guidance sets out:

• How we identify if a child or young person has a special educational need.
• How we assess children and plan for their special educational needs, and how we adapt our teaching.
• Ways in which we can adapt our school environment to meet each child’s needs.
• How we review progress and agree outcomes and involve you and your child in this.

You can find the guidance by clicking here.

The progress of all children/young people is tracked throughout the school data management system, which is called Arbor.

In addition, for children/young people with SEND we regularly review progress towards agreed outcomes assessing whether the support that is in place has made a difference and what we need to do next.

We evaluate this progress against age related expectations and use the SEND descriptors. We use additional assessments for tracking smaller steps of progress in Reading (Salford assessment) and Maths (Sandwell assessment).

The success of the school’s SEND provision is evaluated through:

• Monitoring of classroom practice by SENCO and other members of the Senior Leadership Team.
• Analysis of pupil tracking data and test results for individuals and pupil groups
• Monitoring of procedures and practice by the SEN governor regularly
• Monitoring of the quality of Pupil Profiles and review meetings
• School self-evaluation and the School Improvement Plan
• When we run special intervention programmes for groups of children we assess how successful they have been and use that information to decide on how best to run them in the future.

We offer a broad and balanced curriculum for all children and young people, including those with SEND. The way we adapt this is set out in the School Accessibility Plan.

At Bayards Hill we offer a number of intervention programmes in a range of areas, led by additional teachers, learning mentors and teaching assistants. We ensure staff are well-trained and confident to run these interventions, and have developed “specialist” TAs in certain areas.

To support numeracy needs, TAs and specialist teachers have been trained in Rapid Maths and we offer small differentiated groups during maths lessons.

We use Read Write Inc (RWI) to support all children in Reception and KS1, which offers working groups according to their ability. We offer 1:1 tutoring in RWI as well as two other interventions called FFT and Precision Teaching. For children that have a literacy difficulty we offer an intervention called Toe by Toe.

In order to support Speech and Language at Bayards Hill, we employ 2 external therapists that visit children weekly and carry out interventions, such as Lego Therapy and Zones of Regulation. tWe have a dedicated speech and language member of staff that carries out daily interventions to accelerate progress. Our Reception children are screened on entry to school in September to ensure support is given where necessary. We continue to work with our allocated NHS speech and language therapist that reviews children's progress every 3 months.

Finally, our team of learning mentors are running a number of Social and emotional interventions, such as, SEAL, There’s a Volcano in my tummy, nurture groups and 1:1 support. 2 of our learning mentors are currently training with the Educational Psychology service to become ELSAs (Emotional Literacy Support Assistants) as well as training with the support of the Behaviour Support Service. Some of these interventions are delivered 1:1 and others in small groups.

Pupils very much enjoy these interventions, and we are working hard to improve the links between these interventions and work within the classroom. Bayards Hill employs a play therapist twice a week who works with children on a 1:1 basis or in a group to develop emotional literacy, self-esteem and confidence through play.

We will always contact parents or carers if we have a concern that a child or young person may have a special educational need.

• We work closely with children and young people with SEND and their parents to write a Pupil Profile, which agrees outcomes and how we will all work towards these, and then to review progress. We do this during SEND Clinics (review meetings), parent evening meetings and regular informal discussions.
• There are also opportunities for parents and children to contribute to our policies on SEND and Equality. We do this by: feedback from our annual parent/carer survey, suggestions received directly from parents and children, school council, parent/teacher consultation meetings.

All children have the opportunity to share their views through their school council representatives and the SENCo regularly holds pupil interviews to find out how children with SEND are feeling about their school experience.

• At Bayards Hill, all children are encouraged to reflect on their learning and identify their next steps. This is very much the case for children with special educational needs. Children with special educational needs are encouraged to participate in discussions about their learning and should feel that their views are valued.

We are able to offer a wide range of professional expertise in Special Educational Needs, from our own school staff and also through consultants who work within our school:

• Our Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator is  undertaking the National SENCo qualification with Oxford Brookes University
• We have staff who have enhanced training in a number of interventions for the different areas of SEND.
• Teaching assistants are trained to support the particular needs of the children they work with. We also have the support from our OXSIT Inclusion Consultant.

We have close and effective links with a range of advisory agencies to support us in addressing children’s needs. These include:

• Educational Psychologists
• Communication and Interaction Support Service
• Autism Advisory Service
• Speech and Language Therapist
• Language and Communication Advisory Teacher
• Community Staff Nurse
• Paediatric Occupational Therapist
• Children’s Services
• Primary Care and Mental Health Services (CAMHS)
• Special Educational Needs Advisory Service

Information about these services and what they offer can be found on the Oxfordshire County Council SEND webpages.