Investing In A Setting’s SEN Provision Benefits All Children, Whether They Have Special Needs Or Not
For Ashbourne Day Nurseries, investing heavily in supporting children with special educational needs is a no-brainer – Maddie Weston explains why…
At Ashbourne Day Nurseries we are concerned about our industry’s approach to accommodating children with special educational needs, which can often be found wanting.
In our view, it is important to invest in SEN provision for several reasons. The first is simply that you cannot ignore the needs of a large proportion of young children. In 2015, according to the Department of Education, more than 15% of school children in England had formally identified SEN. Almost 3% had statements of SEN or an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), and nearly 24% were recorded as having ‘moderate learning difficulty’ as their primary need.
Of course, many conditions are diagnosed later in life – so the number of adults who would have benefited from specialised input when they were children will be much higher than this. The second reason is that investing has benefits for all children, whether or not they have special needs. Childcare providers have an important contribution to make towards shaping future attitudes and opinions. We hear a lot about the importance of being an inclusive society, and our work towards it starts the moment each child sets foot in the nursery. We want to help children recognise the gifts and talents of all of those around them.
In modern workplaces, this is expected – for example, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft and Vodafone often hire people who are on the autistic spectrum because of their strengths. These include concentrating on repetitive tasks for a long time, accurately retaining large amounts of information, and uncovering trends. Regardless of disability or impairment, we want each child in our care to have fun alongside other children and receive the best development opportunities we can provide.
Developing expertise
On the other side of the coin, more than one in every 100 people has autism. It is statistically unsurprising, therefore, that at Little Flyers, some of the staff have first-hand experience of autism within their families. I believe this level of empathy helped us achieve the Autism Bronze Award from the Good Beginnings programme in April of this year. Not many nurseries in Essex hold this accreditation – probably because working to achieve it needed commitment from every member of staff. We reviewed and evaluated our practices, and there was a lot of online study and group training. Although it meant hard work for everyone, it opened our eyes to the condition. Even though autism is currently usually diagnosed later in life, there are early indicators of being on the autistic spectrum that can be identified in children from babyhood through to preschool. Recognising these indicators provides an incredibly powerful platform to optimise the child’s development, emotional stability and happiness before they start school. Because our staff are trained, we are able to react quickly and plan appropriately – for example, putting a potentially autistic child in a room full of children can overstimulate them, so we use a sensory room to calm them. We’re also able to support parents – while they will rarely receive a formal diagnosis until their child is older, we are able to ease the emotional turmoil, the anxiety and/or denial, we see them going through and signpost the support available even pre-diagnosis. I can’t overemphasise how rewarding the training we have received in caring for children with autism has been. It has enabled us to spot the signs early and reduce frustration. We’ve since received children from non-specialist nurseries whose parents have noticed a remarkable difference in their little ones within just a few weeks.
Take action
• Discuss what an inclusive society would look like with your staff. Relate this back to children with special needs, and listen to your staff’s suggestions, aspirations and thoughts.
• Create a simple scorecard and use it to assess and understand your staff’s willingness to train in special needs, and the practical implications of committing to a temporary period of putting in out-of-hours study.
• Assess each room, doorway and corridor in your setting to see if your site could be made easier to use by those with sensory or physical disabilities.
• Be proud of your team’s ability and desire to react to accommodate children with all types of special needs.
Taking responsibility
As part of a wider community of early years practitioners, I believe we have a responsibility to help these children – and most of us want to. Nobody who enjoys working in an early years setting wants to see a child withdraw and feel lost or isolated because he/she has a special need that hasn’t been addressed. Training for various special needs types is readily available to all nurseries, but staff buy-in is crucial – willingness to undergo specialised training must be an important recruitment criterion. If we at Ashbourne can train staff in special needs disciplines – as a chain of geographically disparate nurseries, where there’s no economy-of-scale benefits – others can too.
Support is available: there is financial provision, through various local authorities and nationwide schemes, for working with children with special needs. There’s also plenty of practical expertise available. Although having various special needs facilities and training could be viewed as a commercial competitive advantage, in my heart, I simply want to see more practitioners train to care for children with special needs, regardless of where they work. The reading and study period is only temporary, and you’ll be able to make a difference to the young ones you influence for the rest of your life. Surely that’s worth it?
Inclusive environments
As a privately backed chain, Ashbourne Day Nurseries benefits from being able to refurbish the premises it purchases – which isn’t always an option for other nursery owners. It means our sites, Little Flyers amongst them, become wheelchair-accessible and accommodate those with visual and hearing impairments, and many other disabilities – great for children, but also welcomed by parents with disabilities.
Our SEN support is discreet, so children don’t feel singled out, and we’ve woven specialist equipment and assistance into our practice that you wouldn’t normally find in non-specialist facilities.
Maddie Weston is the senior deputy manager of Little Flyers at Ashbourne Day Nurseries; for more information, visit www.ashbournedaynurseries.com
Some of our SEN specialisms have come about as a reaction to events, others because the number of children in need of support was too high for us to ignore. Fragile X Syndrome is an example of the former – relatively rare, it affects just one in 4,000 males and one in 6,000 females, and causes developmental problems. When a parent asked our nursery in Milton Keynes for specialist childcare, we didn’t have the expertise, but we worked hard to put the resources in place. This meant their son could benefit from a highly interactive nursery environment, and access resources through us which otherwise may not have been made available. Our preparation included researching the disorder and sourcing government funding so the child could receive full-time one-to-one attention while at nursery. He had great fun! For longer-term planning, we worked with local councils to design a personalised education plan that would prepare the little boy for school. In practice, special needs provision requires substantial preparation before it streams seamlessly into the nursery’s day-to-day activities, but it is incredibly rewarding for nursery staff. When we foresaw the need for additional assistance, we discussed it with the local authorities and gained the resource.
Training our team
On the other side of the coin, more than one in every 100 people has autism. It is statistically unsurprising, therefore, that at Little Flyers, some of the staff have first-hand experience of autism within their families. I believe this level of empathy helped us achieve the Autism Bronze Award from the Good Beginnings programme in April of this year. Not many nurseries in Essex hold this accreditation – probably because working to achieve it needed commitment from every member of staff. We reviewed and evaluated our practices, and there was a lot of online study and group training. Although it meant hard work for everyone, it opened our eyes to the condition. Even though autism is currently usually diagnosed later in life, there are early indicators of being on the autistic spectrum that can be identified in children from babyhood through to preschool. Recognising these indicators provides an incredibly powerful platform to optimise the child’s development, emotional stability and happiness before they start school. Because our staff are trained, we are able to react quickly and plan appropriately – for example, putting a potentially autistic child in a room full of children can overstimulate them, so we use a sensory room to calm them. We’re also able to support parents – while they will rarely receive a formal diagnosis until their child is older, we are able to ease the emotional turmoil, the anxiety and/or denial, we see them going through and signpost the support available even pre-diagnosis. I can’t overemphasise how rewarding the training we have received in caring for children with autism has been. It has enabled us to spot the signs early and reduce frustration. We’ve since received children from non-specialist nurseries whose parents have noticed a remarkable difference in their little ones within just a few weeks.
Take action
• Discuss what an inclusive society would look like with your staff. Relate this back to children with special needs, and listen to your staff’s suggestions, aspirations and thoughts.
• Create a simple scorecard and use it to assess and understand your staff’s willingness to train in special needs, and the practical implications of committing to a temporary period of putting in out-of-hours study.
• Assess each room, doorway and corridor in your setting to see if your site could be made easier to use by those with sensory or physical disabilities.
• Be proud of your team’s ability and desire to react to accommodate children with all types of special needs.
Taking responsibility
As part of a wider community of early years practitioners, I believe we have a responsibility to help these children – and most of us want to. Nobody who enjoys working in an early years setting wants to see a child withdraw and feel lost or isolated because he/she has a special need that hasn’t been addressed. Training for various special needs types is readily available to all nurseries, but staff buy-in is crucial – willingness to undergo specialised training must be an important recruitment criterion. If we at Ashbourne can train staff in special needs disciplines – as a chain of geographically disparate nurseries, where there’s no economy-of-scale benefits – others can too.
Support is available: there is financial provision, through various local authorities and nationwide schemes, for working with children with special needs. There’s also plenty of practical expertise available. Although having various special needs facilities and training could be viewed as a commercial competitive advantage, in my heart, I simply want to see more practitioners train to care for children with special needs, regardless of where they work. The reading and study period is only temporary, and you’ll be able to make a difference to the young ones you influence for the rest of your life. Surely that’s worth it?
Inclusive environments
As a privately backed chain, Ashbourne Day Nurseries benefits from being able to refurbish the premises it purchases – which isn’t always an option for other nursery owners. It means our sites, Little Flyers amongst them, become wheelchair-accessible and accommodate those with visual and hearing impairments, and many other disabilities – great for children, but also welcomed by parents with disabilities.
Our SEN support is discreet, so children don’t feel singled out, and we’ve woven specialist equipment and assistance into our practice that you wouldn’t normally find in non-specialist facilities.
Maddie Weston is the senior deputy manager of Little Flyers at Ashbourne Day Nurseries; for more information, visit www.ashbournedaynurseries.com
