First diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome as an adult, Christchurch's CAROLINE HEARST believes everyone should be aware of the importance of acknowledging the condition.
There are such a wide variety of ‘special needs’ that sometimes it can be a little too much for any SENCO. But reality bites when there is not nearly enough funding to go around.
We, as teachers, become very good at picking up that there is something ‘amiss’ with a particular student in our class. We may not know the name for it and we certainly don’t have the qualifications to diagnose it but we are prepared to work with what we have and meet their needs as best we can.
Where a school is identified as ‘good or bad’ with their special needs programme often comes down to the quality and commitment of the Special Needs Coordinator. There is a huge raft of funding available to get students the support they need to succeed in today’s classrooms.
Not every student is entitled to one-on-one support, precious few are, but how funding is allocated within the school can go a long way to supporting students at their point of need.
Many primary schools weight the funding to the early primary years, often many classes have not one single teacher but often a Teacher Aide (TA) and other support staff that float between these junior years.
The rationale behind such funding allocation is that provided ‘special needs’ are heavily supported in the early years then the majority of students are ‘caught up’ by the middle and senior years in Primary school and support for additional staff beyond the class teacher is not needed.
Good sound theory that may be but reality is often very different, despite our best intentions let alone issues of transitory kids and supporting those teachers of Y5/6/7/8 who invariably suffer larger class sizes and arguably a heavier administrative workload.
Within military and business circles two people working closely together achieve far more than double their efforts.
This would translate to the classroom. If every teacher had their own TA their ability to support all the students would reach far beyond what would be achieved with half the students in a class with a single teacher. It is why so many ‘team-teaching’ scenarios work well. Sure the budget can’t stretch to two teachers to a class but an effective Teacher/ TA team could deliver an equally favourable result with student achievement.
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