Making the Most of Therapies in Your Setting

15th December 2022Website Admin

Making the Most of Therapies in Your Setting

Victoria Rutter

The ever-changing political landscape has seen far-reaching implications for education and health services; spending cuts have been severe and there is currently a real disparity across the country in the amount and type of therapeutic provision available to children with SEND. It is interesting to reflect on the journey of how therapies emerged in schools, and to observe the inherent successes, but also the frustrations; frustrations largely due to ‘not enough’ rather than the quality of provision.

It is abundantly clear, from both research and anecdotal evidence, that the best possible model for effecting quality provision for each child is to do this within a team. In this case, the team would be school, parents and therapies.

Within School, Not Withdrawn

Historically children were taken out of school to attend therapy sessions in local community clinics and hospitals. This obviously disrupted children’s education and meant there was limited opportunity for liaison with school staff, and also that skills acquired in therapy had little chance of being generalised into everyday school life. With the advent of Statements of Special Educational Needs (Statements) — now Education, Health Care Plans  (EHCPs) — the NHS began to place Therapists in both mainstream and SEND schools. Subsequently, Local Authorities (LAs), through joint funding with the NHS, began financially and operationally to support this model and Therapists began to work regularly in schools to see children — both with and without EHCPs.

Therapists as Members of Staff

Schools and parents could really see the benefit of children receiving therapies in their school environment. However, they also became increasingly frustrated by the amount of input they were being offered, with both the NHS and LAs rationing services due to a never-ending series of spending cuts. Schools began to recruit their own Therapists, giving them more control over the frequency of input, and allowing Therapists and school staff the opportunity truly to work collaboratively as part of a team around the children and young people in education.

Cut to today and this model is seen in both SEND and mainstream schools across the UK. Some settings have multi-disciplinary therapy teams on site full-time, while others have Therapists either employed directly by them or contracted via independent Therapists and practices. Therapists may visit weekly, half-termly or termly depending on the needs and budgets of individual schools.

Arrangements in one SEND School

At Gesher, therapy is not seen as an ‘add-on’, instead, it is part of the overall curriculum and is designed and delivered in tandem with the educational and social curriculum. Therapy targets are woven into all aspects of day-to-day school life, and therapies can be delivered in a variety of ever more creative ways. Staff upskill each other and are able to plan jointly and run interventions.

As in most settings, therapy staff work to a three-tiered approach: Universal (for all), Targeted (for small groups) and Specialist (for individuals). It is at the Universal level that the work can really make an impact: devising, teaching, modelling and reviewing whole-school approaches such as communication and sensory-friendly classrooms, signs and visually supported speech, Zones of Regulation, Movement breaks, facilitating lunchtime chats, playground games and Fun with Food.

Some Lessons For Any School

This model can differ from setting to setting, particularly in mainstream schools. So, what can a regular school do to maximise the impact of therapeutic support where provision can be limited in frequency?

Preparation is Key

Identify the key person who will liaise and plan with the Therapist. This is usually the Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities Coordinator (SENDco). The SENDco can then ask school staff and senior leaders to come up with a list of priorities and areas for development with regard to the particular Therapist that is working with your school; this could include:

  • Identifying particular children (specialist) or groups of children (targeted) who may require assessment and/or intervention
  • Identifying areas of universal need for your particular school, for example: vocabulary, listening, play, handwriting, sensory regulation, etc
  • Creating optimal learning environments such as communication and sensory-friendly classrooms
  • Identifying opportunities for Team Teaching to model and embed Quality First teaching strategies
  • You may wish to identify a Teaching Assistant with relevant skills and/or interest to also liaise with the Therapists and who helps to coordinate and deliver the therapeutic interventions in school
  • Identifying training needs for all staff
  • Identifying training needs for identified staff
  • Identifying pieces of work with parents.

Plan For Each Visit

The SENDco and Therapist can make a joint plan prior to the visit, by email, which ensures:

  • The priorities of the school are met in a timely way
  • School staff are aware that Therapists will be in school/class
  • Parents are informed
  • The Therapist knows in advance what assessments/resources to bring in
  • Time is ring-fenced for the SENDco and Therapist to meet
  • A room can be booked in which to assess children and meet with staff and/or parents.

Taking children out for one-to-one work may be necessary if outlined in a child’s EHCP. In these circumstances, a Teaching Assistant should be able to accompany the child to observe and participate in the session and effect meaningful carry-over. If you are unavailable to catch up at the end of the visit, ask the Therapist to send you a summary of who was seen, meetings that took place, interventions/training carried out, etc.

How Do I Go About Commissioning a Therapist?

It may be cost-effective to link up with other local schools to ‘buy in’ Therapists and many independent Therapists and practices have a choice of bespoke packages to suit a range of needs and budgets.

For further guidelines and information on commissioning Therapies in schools, see the links below:

Speech & Language Therapy

Independent Speech & Language Therapists

Occupational Therapy

Dramatherapy

Art Therapy

Educational Psychology

 

Therapists share the frustration and challenges of our colleagues in education regarding provision.  However, as suggested above, there are ways to maximise outcomes and utilise the therapy provision a school does have.

In essence, those universal approaches will have a significant impact and are achievable and sustainable. Investing in staff training and setting up whole-school approaches benefits all students, leaving the precious remaining Therapy time directed where it is needed the most.

Critical Friendship Groups: Think ‘Fireside Chats’

15th December 2022Website Admin

Critical Friendship Groups: Think ‘Fireside Chats’

David Jackson

Gesher School serves children who learn differently — many of whom have had highly stressful school experiences previously.

To do a brilliant job for these children, we want to be the best that we can be — the best in well-being, best in assessment, in project-based learning design and facilitation, in exhibitions, best community links, best staff development, best parent engagement, skilled in the use of technology and so on.  Not best or better in any comparative way — just the best that we can be to serve the young people, adults and families who are part of our school community…

We need to be the most informed and intentional learning organisation that we can be.

To do that we need to be the most informed and intentional learning organisation that we can be, and one feature of that is to reach out to people who have relevant knowledge and experience to help us with dilemmas or ‘problems of practice’ and to debate with us key elements of our ambition. One strategy for this is Critical Friendship Groups.

Critical Friendship Groups (CFGs)

Gesher started as a primary school and is now an all-through school. For the first 18 months of its existence as an all-through school, it is emphatically in learning mode. We plan to harness the goodwill and professional generosity of the school’s multiple partners and connections to establish a small number of CFGs around key themes that are central to the school’s success.

At the time of writing we have held one CFG so far, on the theme of well-being, when we asked our critical friends:

How do you empower young people to manage and own their own mental and emotional well-being through adolescence and beyond school?

Eight people from backgrounds as diverse as the Anna Freud Centre and Place2Be, and as geographically spread as Bolton to Israel, met online for two hours to engage in a facilitated conversation, the outcomes of which will be featured in Issue 3 of The Bridge. We plan to share both a think-piece distilled from that session and also a tool or framework that might be of practical value to teachers.

Critical Friendship Group Objectives

There are four objectives to CFGs, which are:

  1. To connect Gesher with advanced practice and thinking around issues linked to the school’s ambitions, and to the needs of the SEND sector.
  2. To build relationships with people who have experience, knowledge and insights that can help to advance Gesher’s work and the work of the sector.
  3. To generate usable knowledge and ideas around key ‘problems of practice’.
  4. To create an informal space that allows people to engage and contribute to Gesher’s evolution.

We hope, of course, to learn a huge amount. And we plan to share the things that we learn which are of collective value through the journal.

For the moment, we offer up the idea of ‘fireside chats’ with a group of people who know stuff and who care about young people’s learning, as one that might have value for other schools.