SEN AND DISABILITIES

Every child has the right to learn in a safe, supportive and stimulating environment where they are valued and encouraged to meet their full potential. At Pembroke Park we know this will look different for each child and a variety of adaptations might be employed to ensure that each child is successful. Teachers adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils in an inclusion friendly environment. We seek to work in partnership with parents to achieve the best for each child.

MLP SEN Policy 2024

How is Pembroke Park accessible to children with SEND?

  • The building has wide corridors to enable wheelchair and walking frame access and a lift to all other floor levels.

  • All play areas are accessible for wheelchair and walking frame users.

  • We ensure that equipment used is accessible to all children regardless of their needs.

  • After school activities are accessible for all children.

  • We make every effort to include all pupils in school extra-curricular activities and school trips/residential trips. If an individual risk assessment is necessary, we will write this to ensure that everyone is fully included.

  • Disabled parking is available in main car park.

  • School meals are cooked on the premises and special diets can be catered for.

  • Flexibility of school day for children with medical or complex needs if necessary.

Asses - Plan - Do - Review

At Pembroke Park, when concerns are raised about individual pupils, we complete diagnostic assessments to ensure we have a full understanding of their individual needs. These assessments could be for cognition and learning, social/emotional/mental health, communication and interaction or physical/medical/sensory needs.

Following an assessment of need, each child has an Individual Education Plan (IEP) written by their class teacher with short-term targets for your child to achieve with a detail of what provision will be in place to support your child. You will receive a copy of their IEP and you will also receive a letter each term if your child is receiving targeted intervention.

We review our IEPs at least three times a year (Terms 2, 4 and 6). If your child has received targeted intervention, you will receive a letter at the end of these terms informing you of their progress and whether your child needs to continue next term. You will receive a copy of your child’s evaluated IEP and new IEP at the start of each term.

In Terms 2, 4 and 6 (in addition to two Parents’ Evenings), if your child has an individual My Support Plan or EHCP, you will be invited to meet with your child’s class teacher to review and discuss their progress.

Our SENCo keeps a strategic overview of each intervention and evaluates the effectiveness three times per year. If your child is not making sufficient progress, we may discuss a referral to an external agency for further assessments and advice. This could be, but not limited to:

  • Speech and Language therapy

  • Paediatrician

  • Behaviour Support Services

  • Specialist SEN Services

  • Educational Psychologist (currently unavailable in Wiltshire for assessments)

  • Solution surgery discussion

Our Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator (SENDCO)

Our SENDCo is Mrs Eleanor Pearce, who can be contacted by emailing the school admin@pembrokeparkprimary.net

Mrs Pearce has completed the National Accreditation for SENCos Award. Mrs Pearce is currently in her SENCo role 3.5 days a week to ensure that all pupils with SEN receive the very best provision both in class and through targeted support.

Interventions

Whilst we know that the biggest impact on pupils’ achievement is through Quality First Teaching, we also offer a range of targeted interventions to support pupils’ needs. Interventions take place in the afternoons so that core subjects are not missed. The timing of interventions varies each week so that your child does not miss the same lesson. Your child will have one targeted academic intervention and one targeted social/emotional intervention (if needed) prioritised for each term so that they are not missing a broad and balanced curriculum.

Our interventions include:

  • Bubble handwriting
    Like many primary school teachers Steve who developed bubble handwriting had tried a variety of handwriting schemes with varying degrees of success. Having thought through many common problems with handwriting he developed a simple scaffold that places a bubble either side of the line to support letter formation.

  • This simple scaffold provides a guide to consistently form cursive letters and ensure each letter is uniform in both height and width. Children are able to leave equal spaces between words and see clearly whether or not there is enough space at the end of each line for the next word they intend to write.


  • Write From The Start

    The Write From The Start programme offers a radically different and effective approach that will guide children through the various stages of perceptual and fine-motor development to lay the foundations for flowing, accurate handwriting. The approach has proved to be highly successful in a variety of contexts, and with children with a range of needs.

    The programme contains over 400 carefully graded activities that develop the intrinsic muscles of the hand so that children gain the necessary control to form letter shapes and create appropriate spaces between words, alongside the following perceptual skills required to orientate letters and organise the page:

    • hand-eye co-ordination

    • form constancy

    • spatial organisation

    • figure-ground discrimination

    • orientation

    • laterality

    Reading Between The Lines

    The book contains a collection of 300 texts which are graded and lead the student gradually from simple tasks with picture support and plentiful clues to more challenging scenarios where true inference is required. The texts can be used with whole classes, groups and individual children. This book is designed for teachers and speech & language therapists working in the fields of language and literacy, and concerned with developing inferencing skills in their students. The ability to draw inference is a crucial element in the comprehension of written language, and this resource will be a valuable aid in mainstream classes throughout Key Stage 2.

  • Speech and Language support
    Emotional Literacy Support (ELSA) click to read more

  • Thrive

  • Precision Teaching (click to read more)

  • Fine motor skills

  • Talk About (click to read more)

    Fast Track and Fresh Start phonics
    Fresh Start is a systematic synthetic phonics programme for struggling readers aged 9 – 13+. Pupils are taught at their challenge point, so they learn to read accurately and fluently in just 25 minutes a day. 

    Fresh Start is for students who:

    • are not yet reading age appropriately

    • have missed schooling or are late arrivals into school

    • are new to the UK education system

    • are learning English as an additional language.

     Decodable, age-appropriate stories and non-fiction texts

    Every day, pupils learn new letter-sounds and review previous sounds and words. They apply what they’ve been taught by reading words containing the sounds they know in lively, age-appropriate stories and non-fiction texts closely matched to their phonic knowledge. By the end of the programme, they are able to read these accurately and fluently.