Providing opportunities for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) to develop key communication skills is essential to help them flourish.
One area where this can be particularly important is communicating with the emergency services.
At John F Kennedy Special School, in Newham, East London, our experience - like for many in the special education sector - is that this communication can often be a stressful experience, especially if first responders lack awareness about how best to help a young person they are interacting with.
For example, in one incident described by a police officer, a vulnerable non-verbal autistic person had left their home in the night and became very anxious when the police tried to help.
The incident showed how limited the awareness can be between neurodiverse people and responders over the effective ways to communicate. This can lead to situations escalating and cause increased anxiety and discomfort for both sides.
As such, we decided to work to try to improve this situation for both pupils and emergency service personnel in our area to help provide better outcomes for all.
Communication with emergency services
The project started with a social media awareness campaign that involved pupils creating information posters on effective communication between officials and children with SEND.
This caught the attention of Newham Council, which said it was interested in supporting us in creating resources to implement best practice protocols for emergency responders.
We created a neurodiversity resource pack for police officers that provides visual cues and conversation tools to encourage children to accurately communicate what has happened during an incident and express their needs.
The packs provide pictures including home, a police car and fire engine, to aid specific conversations, and clear images of emotions such as being happy, worried, angry or sad, which can be indicated to by children to help them express their feelings.
Crucially, the packs also enablesneurodiverse individuals to demonstrate where they are hurt by providing specific pictures to point to and the opportunity for responders to ask “visual questions” such as if they are lost, where their parent or carer is or what their name is.
This resource has been shared with frontline police officers across Newham and Waltham Forest on tablets so they are always on-hand, providing immediate access to detailed knowledge on how to support children with SEND.
To bolster the impact of the resource pack, we created a training video that explains how best to utilise the pack and a survey to evaluate its effectiveness thus far.
Furthermore, staff will be visiting our local police station to see first-hand how the pack is used on the frontline and to offer additional support for first responders learning how to engage with the needs of children with SEND more effectively.
Two-way learning
We have also organised visits from local police and fire departments, giving pupils the chance to interact with emergency services personnel and ask questions to further their knowledge in a safe and structured way.
This has helped to familiarise our pupils with people who can help them, alleviating their anxiety around uncertain situations and encouraging trust.
Our pupils have also been taking part in role play lessons that support their learning and awareness of the emergency services, as well as being able to ask questions to officials, helping them to become more familiar with the activities associated with emergency situations.
Since going live with these packs in June 2023, we have been engaging with the Metropolitan Police Service’s director for learning and engagement with the hope that they can be rolled out across the service once we have understood the impact in Newham and Waltham.
We are looking forward to sharing the trial feedback, moving the project on to a wider scale and expanding to other services.
For schools looking to create their own bespoke packs, we found the best process is to reach out directly to local organisations, starting these important conversations with people that are often eager to learn.
Alongside this, we are happy to share our resource packs with anyone who is interested in getting involved in accelerating their own work in this area.
The resources will also be added to Newham Council’s local SEND offer in the coming months, making them available to be downloaded later this year by anyone working with neurodiverse individuals or the emergency services.
Empowering our pupils to be able to communicate their needs has further supported our trust’s mission of ensuring that our pupils are well-integrated into the world around them, enabling them to become independent and take part in society in a meaningful way.
Poppy Rushhore is an early career teacher at John F Kennedy Special School, a member of Learning in Harmony Trust
