If you are confused by the SEND Code of Practice, what comes next is my attempt at a simplification.

First of all, don’t panic. If there is a Statement or an EHCP, and that child is in your class, read it. They are weighty documents, but in them you will find reports from anyone who has been involved in assessing and diagnosing the child. They will have set longer-term outcomes. That will give you a direction of travel. Just like the national curriculum.

The next job is to identify the most pressing areas of need - and you can do this whether the child has a Statement/EHCP or, as is more common, they are in the grey area of SEND support. Children’s needs in school will fall into (and across) four categories of SEND:

• communication and interaction (C&I) - things like speech and language and social difficulties;
• cognition and learning (C&L) - this is learning, thinking and understanding the world;
• social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) - including behaviour and where that behaviour forms a barrier to learning;
• and sensory and/or physical - including children with hearing and/or sight problems.

Personally (it’s the primary teacher in me), I like to draw a diagram - with the child in the centre and their needs around them. Once you have figured out where your priorities are (this might be as simple as ensuring that the child doesn’t call out in class), it can seem as if you are at the foot of a mountain. The task ahead seems so big, so intimidating, the routes up to the summit so many, that it is difficult to know where to start.

If everyone is to feel as if they are making progress, it is important to keep the steps to success small. The most powerful thing that you can do is give a child a target that is achievable.

Then you need to think about:

• the who (who will ensure the child completes the activity, fills in the chart, takes the intervention?);
• the what (what exactly will the child be doing to hit their target?);
• the where (where will this take place?);
• and the when (children with SEND are also entitled to a broad and balanced curriculum).

If you want to put children in a group, think about which children you are putting together - some personalities don’t mix. And whatever you do, don’t forget that as class teacher, you are the one with the legal responsibility, so you need to be the target-setter.

Nancy Gedge is a teacher at Widden Primary School in Gloucester. You can find more detailed advice on target setting and examples in her book Inclusion for Primary School Teachers, published by Bloomsbury and out in May @NancyGedge

This is an article from the 15 April edition of TES. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here

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