What is Special Educational Needs (SEN) Support?

SEN Support is the extra help provided to a child or young person to enable them to learn and make progress in their learning alongside other children or young people of the same age.

It might be adapted teaching methods and materials to suit the child's style and rate of learning or one-to-one support from a teaching assistant. SEN support is tailored to a child or young person particular needs and should be agreed with parents and carers in a SEN Support plan which is regularly reviewed.

For further information read chapters five, six and seven of the SEND Code of Practice 2015.

Read about how your child or young person's place of learning supports children who have special educational needs in their SEN information report.

How does SEN Support work?

You and your child or young person should be at the centre of any decision-making. This is called person-centred planning and can include person-centred reviews. Your child or young persons voice should be heard as part of this process and so a one-page profile should be drawn up to capture this.

You, your child or young person, the early years' keyworker, teacher or tutor and the place of learning's special educational needs and disabilities coordinator (SENCO), will all work together using the graduated approach to create a SEN Support plan.

The early years' keyworker or teacher, and the place of learning's special educational needs and disabilities coordinator (SENCO), will all work together using the graduated approach to create a SEN Support plan.

The graduated approach to SEN Support

Places of learning must use a graduated approach with four stages of action:

Assess
Plan
Do
Review

It is called the graduated approach because it may take several cycles of intervention and different strategies being tried before support needs are understood and met.

A place of learning is able to access more specialist assessments and provision from external agencies if necessary. This should be clearly set out in a school's SEN information report.

Step 1: Assess

The child or young person's needs are identified so that the right SEN Support is given. The assessment should include:

Asking parents and the child or young person for their views
Undertaking assessments and tracking progress
Talking to professionals who work with the child or young person

Step 2: Plan

The child or young person's place of learning and parents agree on the outcomes that the SEN Support is intended to achieve
Everyone who is involved in the process has a say in deciding what kind of SEN Support will be provided. Together they decide a date to review the plan
The plan will be written down. This is so that everyone is clear what different, additional support is going to be put in place

Step 3: Do

The place of learning will put the planned SEN Support into place
The keyworker, teacher(s) or tutor remain responsible for working with the child or young person daily
Everyone involved working with the child or young person will work closely together

Step 4: Review

The SEN Support will be reviewed by the time agreed in the plan
Everyone who is involved in the process should decide together:
- Whether the SEN Support is having a positive impact
- Whether the outcomes have been, or are being, achieved
- Whether new outcomes need to be identified
- Whether the support needs to continue or different support needs to be tried

The assess, plan, do, review cycle starts again.