Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Local Offer
Woodlands Primary School provides a broad and balanced creative curriculum for all pupils that includes developing outdoor learning opportunities. Our prime aim is that all children will have the opportunities to achieve their potential.
At Woodlands, we have an Inclusion Team to identify, support and monitor the needs of all children across all phases of the school. This team consists of the Headteacher (Mrs Crilly), the SENCO (Mrs Murray) and the Inclusion Manager (Mrs Fisher). This team work closely together to offer a comprehensive package of support that encompasses both SEND needs and social and emotional needs. Inclusion Team meetings are held regularly to review, assess and monitor the needs of all children and to consider who and how to support emerging needs.
Learning Mentors
The Inclusion Team together with the learning mentors run many different programmes, such as:
- Relax Kids & MISP
- SAT’s Stress Buster Sessions
- Garden of Dreams – Self Esteem
- Good To Be Me – Self Esteem
- Can You Control It? – Anger Management
- Silver SEAL – PHSE Sessions
- Jigsaw Group
- Friendships
- School Council
- School Eco
- School anti-bullying ambassadors
- Lunchtime groups
- And programmes for families such as Family SEAL
The aim of this work is to identify any barriers to learning, and offer support in a variety of ways including 1:1 sessions, group work, etc.
Parents are the greatest influence in a child’s life, but school has an important role to play too, so it is important we work together.
Medical Conditions Policy -please see policy page on our website.
Admission arrangements for children with Special Educational Needs
Children with a Statement or EHCP (Educational Health Care Plan) can apply for a place through Telford and Wrekin’s Admissions procedures indicating on the form that their child has a statement or EHCP. The Admissions team will then liaise with the SEND Team to ensure the school is the appropriate educational setting to meet your child’s needs before offering a place and dependent on meeting the other admissions criteria outlined on the admissions protocol.
Documents and Links
SEND and Disability Policy SEPT 2023 to be reviewed July 2024
Local Authority Local Offer
RAINBOW ROOM
The Rainbow Room at Woodlands is a calm space in school that allows our children, who are feeling stressed or emotionally dysregulated, to practice self-regulation and coping skills so that they can return to learning with minimal disruption to themselves or their peers. Our calm room is a designated space, intentionally re-purposed for pupils to take a break, defuse anger, and re-centre outside of the classroom. It is always used for prevention to de-escalate heightened emotions, support anxiety and help regulate dysregulated behaviours. Children generally take themselves to use this space independently, however, on occasions, the decision to use this room will be made by the adults in school, supporting the child, to ensure the safety of the child and others in school.
JIGSAW provision Group
Some children having identified SEND, within Woodlands, work separately from their main class group in a smaller learning environment, where they engage in structured learning for either literacy and numeracy or foundation subjects.
Jigsaw currently provide for up to 22 children across Key Stage 2. The groups are led by a qualified teacher and supported by a Forest School trained teaching assistant and a HLTA, who all have experience of working with pupils identified as having complex SEND. The Jigsaw Provision at Woodlands supports children who have been recognised as typically working ‘well below’ the age-related expectation for their own year group, usually at least 2 academic years; sessions take place during the morning session, each day. Places within this group are offered to pupils, who despite having received additional class-based interventions for extended periods, have made only minimal progress over time, and for whom, the mainstream classroom has become overwhelming. These pupils are selected after consultation with the inclusion team, evidence from the SENDCo and members of the wider disciplinary team, such as LSATs and Educational Psychologists. The Jigsaw Provision Group aims to prevent children from falling further behind and to close the gap between these pupils and their peers. This is achieved by offering learning through small group delivery with a clear focus on core subject specific end goals. Staff use a range of visual and practical resources, with a pedagogical emphasis on reteaching and rehearsal of skills, before applying taught knowledge within a different context. Alongside this, nurturing principles and practices are used to support the development of the children’s confidence, resilience, and positive mindset towards learning.
The Jigsaw nurture provision is designed to support some of the most vulnerable children in school; children that are selected for this group generally show significant signs of attachment trauma. Many of the children targeted for this provision present with complex social, emotional, and behavioural needs that require flexible and adaptive teaching and support for their learning needs. The group is led by the same qualified teacher and support staff as the morning group and offers psychosocial interventions, aimed at replacing missing or distorted early nurturing experiences. The group sessions take place on four afternoons each week and utilize the outdoor area, particularly the Forest School Area. The use of the outside space, forest school and the eco-lodge ensures educators can promote the holistic development of all those involved, enabling them to learn in physical and creative ways and express their emotions within a safe and supportive structure. The children are encouraged and supported to develop and strengthen their social and emotional skills, through collaborative learning, sharing of experiences, the opportunity to take supported risks appropriate to the environment and to themselves and share daily circle times and celebrate successes. The children are encouraged to develop their learning in the context of the wider curriculum subjects and express their ideas in a variety of different ways, such as arts, design technology and scientific enquiry. There is a flexible offer for some of the children; these children are supported to attend some lessons with their class, enabling them to maintain a sense of belonging in their year group. The primary aim of this intervention is to facilitate re-integration so children can re-join their own classes full time as confident and successful learners.
The staff work closely with parents, carers, and members of a multi-agency team (including the Educational Psychologist, LSAT, Speech and Language Therapists, Family Support Workers, Social workers, and Mental Health Support Workers), to provide a collaborative offer to improve outcomes for the children they support.
SEMH SEND Provision Group – Rationale
Intent
The newly established provision group provides support for our most vulnerable children from Y1, Y2 and Y3, who are displaying long-term complex and significant Attachment and Trauma and Social and Emotional difficulties. It is led by a qualified teacher who is also our Deputy SENCo, supported by 3 TAs. The provision TA team include an experienced ELSA support TA, with extensive experience of supporting several of the pupils attending, as well as 2 further TAs who have previously worked as 1:1 support within classes.
This enhanced provision group offers an adapted learning accommodation, adapted curriculum offer, adapted teaching and learning strategies and a very small class size, in a quiet, low-arousal space. Every child allocated a place is either in receipt of, or on a pathway to request additional funding.
Most of the children access their cohort curriculum offer using an appropriate pace, coverage, content, and structure. The provision group will receive regular support from Woodlands’ SENCo, Woodlands’ Inclusion Team, specialist staff and outside agencies.
Assessment and progress will be tracked using the curriculum progress documents as per their cohort peers.
At Woodlands, we respect the individual differences and specialist needs of all our children, to promote an inclusive and welcoming environment. Each child is treated with care, respect and offered an inclusive provision to support their developmental needs.
Implementation
Teaching and learning strategies and resources are fully adapted in respect of, and to reflect, the provision required to motivate and engage those children currently attending. This means an adapted environment; a small, low arousal learning space, set up with individual personalised workstations, learning tasks delivered using Task Baskets, Widgit visual prompts, high staffing ratio (4:7). Teaching and Learning adaptations include chunked learning, with regular sensory/movement breaks, regular use of the school safe space, the ‘Rainbow Room’ and a nurture approach (food and drink welcome, etc) and a final task of Circle Time.
This implementation ensures a bespoke and fully accessible curriculum offer for all children, whatever their individual need and difficulty.
Regular assessment, observation and monitoring of all children and reflection time with staff, along with termly EP supervision, allows for continuous development of the provision offer. This is completed by provision staff, class teachers and the wider Inclusion Team, and includes the involvement of specialist outside agencies. This bespoke approach enables us to support our most vulnerable children with the most appropriate learning environment and
opportunities, fosters inclusion and recognises the individual strengths, difficulties and needs of those children the provision supports.
The Provision Teacher and ELSA TA (trained by the LA EPS) are also both MAPA trained, which ensures the safety of all in the provision accommodation.
Provision staff will work closely with class teachers, the SENCo and wider SLT team to contribute to regular monitoring and evaluation and review meetings, to build relationships with parents/carers and to ensure the ongoing provision needs are implemented.
You can see the latest activity from Jigsaw on their class pages in our Parents’ Area:
Woodlands is also part of The Attachment Research Community (ARC), a charitable organisation set up in 2017 by virtual school heads, school leaders, psychologists, training organisations and academics, with a mission for ‘every school to be attachment and trauma aware by 2025’.
ARC’s purpose is to support all schools and education settings to be attachment and trauma aware in their practice for the benefit of all members of the learning community and particularly the most vulnerable, by bringing together, sharing and celebrating best practice. In 2024, we achieved the ARC Gold Award.
