Continuous Professional Development
Whatever your role in school, our courses are designed to deepen understanding, build inclusive practice and support meaningful outcomes for all learners.
Our Courses
We offer a range of central training opportunities developed and led by our specialist team. Our course menu is informed by the ever changing landscape of SEND and inclusion. All of our courses can also be personalised and delivered directly within your setting.
our courses
Explore our diverse range of training modules below.
What to expect:
The SEND and inclusion landscape is ever evolving with lots of new developments on the horizon as practice changes and develops in response to the ‘Every Child Achieving and Thriving’ white paper.
To help you stay ahead of the game we are offering six one-hour virtual briefing sessions. Each session will explore:
– The latest Department for Education guidance
– Local and national updates
– SEND and inclusion research findings
– Signposting and sharing of useful resources
– Sharing of best practice
– Support and advice on the leadership role and aspects of SEND and inclusion
Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities carries many legalities which many of us worry about.
To help you in making sure that you know what is expected and understand the law and its application, through a face-to-face delivery this course explores:
– The Children and Families Act (2014)
– An Introduction to the Disability Equality Act (2010)
– Duties applicable to schools and local authorities
– Education and Health Care Needs assessments, the need for specificity and annual reviews
– Exclusions
– Disability discrimination
– Mental capacity
– Mediation
– Transport
There are lots of reasons why children and young people cannot attend school. One of these could be linked to Emotionally Based School Avoidance or EBSA. In the UK, EBSA is estimated to be the reason why up to 5% of the school population don’t attend school, although the actual number is likely higher, as many children and young people experiencing distress still attend. EBSA isn’t about a ‘won’t attend’, it is a genuine ‘can’t.’
How can you identify and support pupils who are risk of developing an EBSA response to school and support those that are already in that situation?
Our brand-new face-to-face course explores:
- What is EBSA?
- Early identification of risk factors.
- Support, adaptions and interventions.
- Supporting pupils who are already locked into the EBSA cycle.
- Measuring impact.
- Signposting of resources and further sources of support.
Learning and accessing the wider school life are social acts which depend heavily upon how successfully our pupils interact with their classroom peers and the adults in school. Having well developed social skills improves outcomes for life such as being successful in the world of work. During our new course we will:
- Explore factors that may influence a pupil’s social development and their ability to interact successfully with peers and adults.
- Identify key social skills for social communication including – listening and attention, turn-taking, cooperation and conflict resolution.
- Explore a range of strategies that can support children in developing social skills.
- Consider practical strategies to explicitly teach and model social skills within everyday classroom activities.
To be successful, independent classroom learners, our children and young people need to be able to:
- Recall previous learning whilst holding and processing new information to give an output,
- Self-monitor,
- Plan and prioritise,
- Initiate the task,
- Organise themselves and the required resources,
- Control their impulses,
- Control their emotions,
- Think flexibly.
This all needs to happen automatically, often simultaneously and amongst the backdrop of a busy learning environment full of other learners. These are the essential lifelong learning skills of executive functioning and working memory that we don’t necessarily explicitly teach.
Our brand-new face-to-face course explores:
- An in depth look at the essential learning skills related to executive functioning and working memory.
- Identification of learning differences related to executive functioning and working memory difficulties.
- Adapting classroom teaching to promote task organisation, execution and completion leading to independence.
- Supporting cognitive load.
- Additional interventions.
- Measuring progress.
To be ready to learn children need to be in the right state. Sensory circuits provide a quick, easy and effective way to ensure that children are ready to learn. They not only benefit children with sensory processing differences, but they are also very supportive for all.
Our new face-to-face course explores:
- What are sensory circuits? Exploring the three main components.
- Understanding sensory integration and sensory processing.
- Exploring the wide range of needs that can be supported by sensory circuits.
- How to personalise and adapt sensory circuits to meet individual learners needs.
- How to plan a sensory circuit using the equipment that you already have.
- Practical ‘hands on’ time to trial and build sensory circuits.
- Ideas on how to enhance sensory circuits.
- Problem solving and adapting for success.
- Ways to use sensory circuits in the classroom.
Typically, in the early stages of language development children say mainly single words, such as ‘biscuit’ or ‘more’. As they progress, they put these single words together to make two-word phrases such as ‘more biscuit’. Gradually the length of these phrases increases as the child develops.
Learning to communicate by initially using and understanding mainly single words could be described as typical development of how children learn to talk and understand words. However, children develop in many different ways. One of these differences can be how often a child communicates using memorised phrases and the type of memorised phrases they say. This can be described as Gestalt Language Processing. Understanding and support children who learn language in this way can reduce many barriers to communicating and learning.
Our brand-new face-to-face course explores:
- What is Gestalt Language Processing?
- The stages of Gestalt Language Processing development.
- Supportive strategies to reduce barriers to learning and communication.
- Identifying progress.
Early Identification leads to early intervention which maximises children’s chances of school success. Our new SEN in the EYFS course focuses upon helping you to give your children the very best start. During this course we will:
- Investigate what is typically expected of a child who begins in the EYFS.
- Explore early identification of SEND through the application of a graduated response.
- Explore the new areas of development proposed in the White Paper and practical ways of supporting them.
- Explore an overview of some of the main support strategies for Early Years SEND children.
- Explore what the early stages of development can look like for a child with SEND in the EYFS.
- Explore how to create an enabling pedagogy approach to working with Early Years children with SEN.
- Explore how to identify and utilise children’s dominant play schemas.
- Explore how to set up the Early Years for success with SEND children.