How do we ensure children with SEND enjoy a broad and balanced curriculum?

We provide a curriculum that is broad, balanced, motivating and accessible to all children. We want our exciting curriculum to be one of the reasons our children love coming to school!

We work hard to ensure that all of our children achieve in lots of different ways as well as academic learning – for example, in drama, sport, music, dance, showing leadership and taking on responsibilities. Our curriculum fulfills the requirements of the National Curriculum, but is designed specifically for the pupils in our school.

Part of our curriculum focuses on the importance of learning behaviours and the impact these have on a child's academic and emotional development.

We encourage children with SEND to play a full part in the life of our school. Many of our children with a special educational need have extra responsibilities and taking such roles helps them to communicate more confidently with other children.

We arrange educational visits and journeys and make sure that all of our children can take part. For all educational visits, we do a risk assessment and where necessary make reasonable adjustments to plans and arrangements to make sure that all children can attend if necessary.

Additional interventions are planned to accelerate children's progress in specific areas. We choose these interventions after looking carefully at research. These sessions run for a limited time. Some may be only 6 weeks, frequent and short. For example, two or three twenty-minute sessions per week. They are well taught by a trained teacher or teaching assistant.

Our SENCO monitors the quality and effectiveness of these interventions every term. For example, we measure a reading level at the start of a reading intervention and then assess progress over time and levels of attainment to inform us about the impact of each session. If a child is not making sufficient progress and/or is falling short of expectations, we will consider other forms of support.

We also adapt the curriculum to include children with SEND, for example:

• providing quiet 'time-out' for children with emotional needs;
• providing a visual timetable and clear explanations of tasks for children with communication needs;
• providing assistive technology where necessary to ensure effective communication;
• additional staff provide support for learning in the classroom and sometimes in small groups away from the main part of the lesson for a short period of time by TAs or teachers.

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