Target audience

Aimed at all practitioners and senior leaders looking for effective ways to engage pupils and parents in progress and outcomes.

Overview

The SEND Code of Practice (2014) demands greater responsibility and accountability from the class teacher for the SEND provision and outcomes within that class. This may mean subtle changes in the role of the SENCO in some schools, particularly where the SENCO has taken responsibility for most of the meetings with parents, writing and reviewing IEPS, or directly teaching pupil interventions. SENCOS are expected to empower class teachers to take responsibility for the progress and provision for SEND pupils. Where teaching assistants are supporting pupils and classes, the over-arching responsibility for pupil progress rests with the class teacher. This course aims to empower all staff to liaise, plan and review with pupils and parents in a way which makes school processes truly accessible, and reduces some of challenges faced by practitioners in pupil and parent voice. With the application of a few simple strategies, schools can meet and exceed the requirements of the SEND Code of Practice (2015).

Target audience

Aimed at all classroom teachers, SENCOS and Inclusion Managers.

Overview

November 2015’s DfE publication, ‘Supporting the attainment of disadvantaged pupils: Briefing for school leaders’, detailing research conducted by NFER and Durham University, highlights the need for high quality teaching for all as one of the seven building blocks for increasing school effectiveness for disadvantaged pupils. The document states, ‘Leaders of more successful schools emphasise the importance of quality teaching first.’ The SEND Code of Practice (2015) also places a renewed emphasis on quality first teaching for all children, aimed at both reducing the number of children requiring Special Educational Provision, and ensuring that those with SEND are taught alongside their peers. This raises many questions for practitioners. How can this be achieved when the gaps in children’s learning can be so wide? What does quality first teaching look like now that we are so accustomed to teaching through interventions? This course explores what inclusive practice can look like for children with cognition and learning difficulties and, indeed, for all underachieving children.

​Target audience

Primarily teaching assistants, but is more effective if there is whole school involvement.

Overview

There are now around 250,000 teaching assistants in English schools. This represents around treble the number that existed in 2000 (EEF, 2016). In primary schools, there are more teaching assistants than teachers. Unlike teachers, however, the roles, responsibilities and preparatory training for this are extremely wide and varied. Unlike teachers, there is no common qualification or body of study that all teaching assistants must have before they can embark on their role. Yet despite training for teaching assistants being very patchy and varied, schools across England expect them to be firmly on the frontline of learning and teaching. Yet recent research from the Education Endowment Foundation (2016) has highlighted that without strong and effective training and deployment, teaching assistants can have very little positive impact on pupil progress – a bitter pill to swallow for any hard-working teaching assistant. However, the researchers do not point any blame at teaching assistants for this situation, but identify conditions of employment, preparedness and deployment as the ingredients that either help or hinder them from achieving good practice.

This course does not claim to provide all the training a teaching assistant will ever need – certainly not in one session! But it is a very helpful introduction to the fundamentals of learning for new teaching assistants, whilst also being a very thought-provoking reflection for those more experienced. It is not subject-specific, but addresses the more rooted questions around how children learn and how they fail. It addresses how we can use skillful questioning to lift the lid on children’s learning, and how we can use practical strategies to encourage independent learners. This is about exploring the role of teaching assistants at the point of interaction with children. I hope it forms an interesting part in a much wider professional development journey.

Target audience

Primarily teaching assistants, but is more effective if there is whole school involvement

Please note that this course follows directly from Teaching Assistants on the Frontline of Learning (see details above), and cannot be delivered separately. Ideally, it is more effective to have a gap of a few weeks between the two courses to give delegates opportunity to reflect and feedback on classroom experiences.​

Target audience

Primary teaching assistants

Overview

This course highlights strong multi-sensory language strategies to support phonics and spelling, as well as looking at structured ways to engage in reading with children, both individually and through a guided reading experience.

Please note that this course follows directly from Teaching Assistants on the Frontline of Learning (see details above), and cannot be delivered separately. Ideally, it is more effective to have a gap of a few weeks between the two courses to give delegates opportunity to reflect and feedback on classroom experience.

Target audience

Training and Newly Qualified Teachers

Overview

The recent Carter review of Initial Teacher Training highlighted how little emphasis was given to the area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities in the diet of many training teachers. Colleagues new to the profession repeatedly talk of how little time was given in their training to this area. This course is based on the premise that excellent provision for pupils with SEND starts from a Quality First Teaching basis. We examine what is required and expected of teachers in the Code of Practice, what causes some children to struggle with learning in the classroom, particularly those external barriers to learning that can present in the environment. We explore a range of practical teaching and learning strategies that can help teachers reduce and eliminate many of those barriers, and start to appreciate when Quality First Teaching requires some reasonable adjustments. The message given is that inclusive classrooms don’t have to be difficult to create or hard to manage, that if you can facilitate successful progress in pupils with SEND, you are likely to be seeing good progress from the rest of your class, and that high expectations of pupils with SEND are the crucial underpinning of success.

Target audience

SENCOS, Inclusion Managers, Headteachers and other senior leaders responsible for the line management of teaching assistants.

Overview

This course allows an exploration of performance management for support staff in the current context of recent research, agendas and the 2015 SEND Code of Practice. It provides strategies to measure the impact of teaching assistant input on children’s learning. It leaves delegates with what many schools say they require: a strong system for performance management of classroom support staff, using agreed standards. This course will leave delegates with clear methods of evaluating the developing skills, attitudes and practice of support staff.

Target audience

Headteachers

Overview

This interactive session examines what inclusion is, and can be, against the backdrop of current national agendas. It highlights how quality first teaching, intervention and high-quality triangulation of assessment can help us demonstrate inclusive practice and meet the principles of the Code of Practice (2015). Finally, it highlights where the current focus should be in SEND leadership.

Target audience:

This training is aimed at developing the skills and knowledge of anyone who has to chair meetings which is particularly relevant to:

• Heads and deputies
• SENCOs
• SLT members
• Key workers

Overview

• Exploring the ‘whole elephant’ – story so far of experience in chairing meetings – good and bad meetings
• Personal planning for future chairing – what do I need to get better at – what should I manage?
• Specific skill teaching – re when things go wrong – eg tears, personal attacks, talking in side conversations, silent members, lack of contribution, anger and so on…‘best saves’ explored with group – using live role play – with one chair
• Emotional elements of chairing – ‘it’s not personal’ – splitting, projection, transference explored and ‘handling projections’ activity

Target audience

All teachers, co-ordinators and leaders of SEND, disadvantaged learners and other vulnerable learning groups.

Overview

The national agenda has now put responsibility for year-on-year pupil assessment firmly in the hands of individual schools. We have seen the first wave of national tests using scaled scoring. This takes us slightly further forward towards a standardised assessment system, but sadly falls short of being truly age-standardised. Nonetheless, it does mean that we will more easily be able to sit such assessment alongside a standardised learning profile of a child. In this course, we explore what such learning profiles might look like and examine the diverse uses for standardised assessment; from administering to interpretation, single tests to comparison across tests. We look at how we might be able to develop robust systems that meet the needs of all pupils, including the fragile learners and vulnerable groups.

Target audience

SENCOs, Inclusion Managers, Assessment Co-ordinators and others administering assessments
This is an ideal course for delivering to SEN Clusters

Overview

Standardised and cognitive assessments can lift the lid on a child’s mind, adding significantly to our knowledge and understanding of their strengths and difficulties. They can help us to understand why a child may be struggling, and work out how we might modify our teaching and learning strategies. They can help us to identify in greater detail what is holding a child back. Some of these types of assessments are carried out by educational psychologists and specialists, but there are many assessments specifically aimed at school SENCOS to assist them, and their colleagues, with in-house exploration of a child’s learning toolkit. However, if pupils are to get the benefit of such assessments, they need to be administered confidently, thoroughly and rigorously. This course is for you if:

• You currently use standardised assessments for pupils with SEN, but you’re not certain that you’re getting the most out of them.
• You would like to make use of standardised assessment, but you’re not yet confident to know how to administer them well.
• You have standardised assessments in school, but you don’t know what to do with them.
• You find EP and specialist reports difficult to understand or interpret.

Target audience

All staff

Overview

This course is extremely practical, yet routed in much theory and research conducted over decades. Memory strategies and training have been key components of multi-sensory language programmes for dyslexic pupils for many years (Hickey, 1977; Combley, 2001; Kelly et al., 2011). They have formed a significant part of post-graduate training programmes for specific learning difficulty, as memory has been understood to be a key factor of the difficulties for children’s cognitive development and subsequent attainment (Combley, 2001; Kelly et al., 2011; Henry, 2012). Those who have worked individually with children in this way will be acutely aware of the difference such training can make to children’s ability to retain digits or objects in short-term memory, and their ability to hold letters, words or sentences in their heads for spelling and writing. This is born out by the repeated success of such teaching strategies in enabling children to read and write to the level of their peers, where they have previously been unresponsive to mainstream classroom strategies. Specialist practitioners will have assessed and re-assessed pupils and seen the increase in working memory following strategy application. Many of the strategies advocated are aimed at helping children to reduce working memory overload, whilst others are aimed at helping them to use their working memory capacity more effectively. A key feature of good specialist teaching and, as it emerges, all teaching, is the application of meta-cognition in the development of these strategies (EEF, 2015). It is important that children are aware of why they are learning these strategies, and how the application of such strategies can help them to learn more effectively.

Earlier theorists suggested that working memory had a limited capacity or ceiling to it in every person. Yet this would seem to contradict the views of educationalists, such as Kelly et al. (2011), who assert that, ‘Working memory skills can be developed in learners with dyslexia through teaching strategies to facilitate the holding of information in working memory.’ She goes on to cite a number of strategies, including meta-cognition, multi-sensory techniques, verbal rehearsal, chunking, and use of pattern, as effective ways of training the memory. The practical work carried out for decades by educationalists, and centuries by parents and grand-parents (in games such as ‘I went to market …’) now appears to be substantiated by psychology and neuroscience, where electronic memory training programs are demonstrating almost indisputable evidence that the memory can, indeed, be trained and developed.

‘For a long time, psychologists thought that we were stuck with our working memory size and couldn’t change it. However, exciting cutting-edge research suggests that we can train our brain and improve working memory. In response to this, there has been a surge of brain training products in the last five to ten years and some of these have found their way into schools.’ (Packiam Alloway, 2015).

Further to this, it seems possible that in the case of adaptive WM training programs, they may be increasing both the neural plasticity of the WM and spontaneously developing the learner’s use of strategy in some areas, without explicit strategy teaching.
‘Adaptive working memory training programs do not explicitly teach meta-cognitive techniques, but they may promote the development or enhancement of strategies spontaneously employed to complete working memory tasks. Introspective reports from children in our own training studies support the notion that, even in the absence of direct strategy instruction, repeated practice on working memory tasks promotes the development of idiosyncratic strategies.’ (Dunning et al., 2014).

Current research is now focusing on establishing how much of WM development is transferrable to academic progress and attainment (Pearson publish an abundance of research on this), and how strategies from working memory theory can be applied to literacy and numeracy teaching. For example, Tocci (2014) examines the application of rehearsal, pace and chunking in a reading intervention called ‘Rip It Up Reading’, echoing the techniques of many years of multi-sensory teaching for specific learning difficulty.

Target audience

Primarily aimed at Foundation Stage and KS1 teachers and teaching assistants, though KS2 colleagues have also found it a useful insight into potential strategies for pupils still struggling with phonics, reading and spelling.

Overview

In 2010, OFSTED produced a report titled, ‘Reading by Six: How the best schools do it’. This document highlighted that ‘The best primary schools in England teach virtually every child to read, regardless of the social and economic circumstances of their neighbourhoods, the ethnicity of their pupils, the language spoken at home and most special educational needs or disabilities.’ Of particular interest is the recommendation that any phonics programme in school should ‘use a multi-sensory approach so that children learn variously from simultaneous visual, auditory and kinaesthetic activities which are designed to secure essential phonic knowledge and skills’. It is also clear to point out that, ‘Multi-sensory activities should be interesting and engaging but firmly focused on intensifying the learning associated with its phonic goal. They should avoid taking children down a circuitous route only tenuously linked to the goal. This means avoiding over-elaborate activities that are difficult to manage and take too long to complete, thus distracting the children from concentrating on the learning goal.’ With this in mind, and more than a cursory nod to the multi-sensory language programmes employed by specialist teachers through the decades, we look at successful multi-sensory language strategies adapted for young children, and establish precisely what is, and is not, a multi-sensory learning experience.

Target audience

All staff – SENCOS, Teachers, maths subject-leads, Inclusion Managers, teaching assistants.

Overview

The significance of maintaining good concrete and visual representations for children throughout their mathematical education.
Zena will identify why some children find it difficult to grasp mathematical concepts, and what can be done within a quality first teaching context to address these difficulties and remove some of the barriers.
Presented with a range of practical strategies for all primary ages.

Target audience

Teachers, teaching assistants, SENCO’s, maths subject leaders

Overview

This course is a supplementary course to ‘Maths – Removing the Barriers’. It is designed to support teaching staff who may never have used these versatile rods before, showing their variety of strategies to use for a wide range of mathematical concepts and for all ages and stages of development.

Target audience

All primary teachers and teaching assistants
Training and Newly Qualified Teachers
Senior leaders responsible for developing reading comprehension

Overview

Reading is a complex process, requiring the synthesis of many skills. Yet it is possible to break the process down into these individual skills. In this course, we aim to unpick the Simple View of Reading, using its component parts and assessment strategies to identify where some children may be struggling. From this, we look at ways to optimise the reading opportunities that children get in primary school. We develop strategies for reading with children individually, which can be shared easily with everyone who hears children read in school, and parents and carers at home too. We go on to look at effective strategies to make guided or reciprocal reading work effectively.

Target audience

Teachers, teaching assistants, SENCOS, literacy subject leaders.

Overview

This course highlights the multi-sensory nature of reading and writing. Built on the very latest research and specialist teaching techniques, it allows teachers to identify potential literacy difficulties much earlier in a child’s schooling than we might have previously thought possible. We analyse the strategies that these children require to ensure that they keep up with their peers, rather than falling behind and allowing the gap to widen.

Target audience

Teachers, teaching assistants, SENCOS, literacy subject leaders.

Overview

Following on from the previous course, we examine the complexity of the writing process and the wider range of barriers to learning that exist for pupils in writing. We reflect on when intervention is appropriate and when it is not, and what the evidence is from research around writing development. Delegates go away with a range of practical strategies to apply in the classroom.

Target audience:

• Heads and deputies
• SENCOs
• Advanced skills teachers
• Primary teachers
• Early years and school based practitioners
• Key workers
• Teaching Assistants with support roles

Overview:

• Shared experiences of teaching and parenting around emotional well being
• Circle of Courage as a way of understanding emotional needs
• Emotional and behavioural needs
• Anger and violence
• Solutions and Insights Circle –  Problem Solving
• What children really need

•  Zena is fabulous, her passion really comes through and is inspiring
• Inspirational course!
• Wow! Too many useful aspects to mention!
• An incredibly thorough course that unpicked all priorities.
• Engaging throughout with excellent use of practical resources.
• Very motivating, inspiring, calm but enthusiastic and authentic!
• A fantastic course. Zena was engaging and inspiring and I hung on her every word.
• Fabulous – a really helpful and practical course!
• The course was delivered in an excellent way. Inspirational. Thank you.
• Very professional delivery, obvious credibility and very relevant.
• Engaging, interesting, informative, inspiring, relevant.
• Fantastic! Zena is so knowledgeable and everything very clear to understand.
• Excellent course and delivery with super resources and ideas to support all children.
• The delivery was fantastic. Zena was incredibly knowledgeable and had a good balance of information mixed with humour with plenty of information that was all relevant and important.
• Extremely visual, very interesting, thoughtful ideas with good links.
• Great engaging delivery with appropriate and thought-provoking content.
• Fantastic ideas, research and resources.
• Thank you very much! I have really enjoyed the content, the enjoyable way of learning, lots of facts from research and examples plus high quality multi-sensory activities and sessions!
• Thank-you for sharing the true message of inclusivity….how to include every child within the classroom and allow them to surpass the limitations sometimes put upon them.
• Clear delivery, explanations and strategies for the classroom.
• A very interesting course highlighting the importance of working memory and multi-sensory teaching.
• Refreshing, clear messages.
• Fabulously interactive and fascinating to learn, practise and share ideas – thank you.
• Zena was passionate about positive learning experiences for all children and was extremely knowledgeable.
• Fantastic session!
• Very informative with a good balance between information and activities.
• I really liked the practical activities as it enabled myself to be put in child’s position.
• Clarity in examples and theories behind thinking.
• I couldn’t single out a single point as all of it was useful and I am so glad I was able to listen. As a new SENCO I will be using all of it.
• Very useful to hear of real-life examples of pupils from Zena’s own practice.
• I’ve enjoyed many of Zena’s courses and training…..and now the whole staff have had chance to do the same at last! Thank you!
• Clear and enthusiastic delivery.
• Very enjoyable training.
• Handouts good especially with room to write notes.
• Well presented with lots of practical time given.
• Clear guidance and loved the practical activities and opportunity to apply what we had just learned.
• I feel more confident to provide multi-sensory sessions that cater for all children and enable them all to achieve the same objective.
• Highly enjoyable course – thank you.
• Very useful and informative with lots of practical ideas. Really made me think about and reflect on my own teaching and things I can change.
• Enjoyable course, very informative….lovely ideas shared and I can’t wait to try these out in class.
• Very good delivery and knowledgeable leader. The inclusion of activities was really good as we could apply what has been learnt.
• Excellent delivery and course content.