Is The Corridor By Your Loos Really The Best Place For A SEND Intervention?
Interventions get squeezed into any available space, but is a table outside the loos really the best place for children, especially those with SEND, to learn, asks Nancy Gedge
- by Nancy Gedge
When I was a little girl, my classroom got some new curtains and the event is burned into my memory. The windows were too high to look out of when you were sitting at your desk, but the pattern of horses that dashed across the curtain fabric entertained me many times when my workbook failed to inspire.
That classroom, being as it was mostly windows, had little in it by way of displays. I remember an alphabet frieze hung over the teacher’s desk that used to help me find my way around the dictionary, but that was about it. How different to the classrooms of today. In some, you can barely move for printed-out posters, laminated and attached to every available surface, as well as hanging from homemade washing lines. Making your way across them is like an obstacle course, and it’s a positive trial for many children with autism.
When we were looking for a school for my son Sam, who has Down’s syndrome, the environment was one of the things we thought about. Too far to walk to every day? Off the list.
Over-subscribed and therefore huge classes? We turned ourselves away. Open plan? For our little flitterer? No chance. In the end, we plumped for a school that had created several smaller rooms, rooms we knew that Sam would use when he wasn’t being taught with the rest of the class.
Like many children with SEND, Sam spent a lot of his primary years in intervention groups. When a child has needs that are significantly different to the rest of the class there is often not a great deal you can do about that. When schools are under pressure to come up with acceptable results, there isn’t a lot of choice in the matter. Something must be done, and we must been seen to be doing it. There is, however, quite a bit of choice in how you go about it.
There’s the style of intervention, for a start. No one wants their child, especially if she is an included one, to spend a lot of time on her own with a one-to-one TA. The day I inadvertently observed a rather lovely reading session between Sam and his one-to-one was tinged with sadness as he wasn’t with the rest of the class. An intervention doesn’t always have to mean withdrawal.
And then there’s the resources you use. As part of my SENCo course, I was keen to find out if the reading programme we have on a couple of computers at school was worth the money. After all, practice makes perfect, and reading to something non-judgemental, in private, has to be good, right? There’s interesting research about the effect a child reading to a specially trained dog can have on particular children; could it be transferred to a computer programme?
Oh dear. The best laid plans. It turns out that I had not thought carefully enough about the environment. I hadn’t realised that with all the noise going on around sensitive microphones, the doors banging, the voices of TAs and children working on whatever interventions were also running in the shared space, the children spent more time trying to set the thing up than doing any reading. I’d have been better off hearing them read myself.
Like me, many teachers are guilty of the same thing. We don’t stop to think about the environment surrounding children before we pack them off to their various intervention groups. Few schools have dedicated smaller rooms where distractable children can work effectively. Those with reading difficulties, short working memory spans and problems in processing the sensory information that bombards them within the busy walls of the school need to be in places where distractions are minimised.
More often than not the children, and their teachers or TAs, are squeezed into the spaces in between. The smelly spot next to the cloakroom. Betwixt the plimsolls and the door to the playground. On the floor. I do wonder sometimes whether, like my failed experiment, these interventions make any difference at all. Or whether, in reality, it’s all just for show.
About the author
Nancy Gedge is a primary teacher in Gloucestershire. She blogs at notsoordinarydiary.wordpress.com
