5 lessons from teaching SEND pupils during the pandemic

Ofsted recently reported that children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) have been left even further behind their peers.

AT our Nacro Further Education and Skills Centres nearly half of our learners have some kind of identified learning need and at our Totton Centre we have a specialist unit with 125 high-needs learners with SEND on a range of Skills for Life courses. Here are five lessons we learnt in the past 18 months:

Anxiety was one of the biggest barriers

Many of our learners with SEND felt they were at a higher risk of getting Covid, either due to additional health issues or the anxiety of the people around them filtering through. They often struggled to understand the complexities of the situation and as a result it panicked some of them. That put a big strain on their learning. Many didn’t feel comfortable coming into the Centres despite struggling with online study. We worked with them, and particularly their parents, to reassure them about our Covid-safe centres and where they had higher needs provided visual social stories to explain the Covid situation.

For example, one of our high-need learners struggled to understand why she could not come into college or attend her local day services. She refused to complete any college work at home, because for her home is for home activities and college was for college activities. The Nacro tutor focused on her likes and interests and tailored activities around these, positioning the work in this way helped her to feel comfortable doing it at home.

Hands-on and repetition is vital

Many of the courses we teach are practical, vocational courses. Our animal care course is particularly popular with learners with SEND and our Skills for Life courses teaches the skills needed for preparation for adulthood.

Teaching theory online hasn’t been a massive problem but when it comes to the practical side of our courses this is where our learners with SEND have really missed out. They really benefit from the repeated practice of practical skills, such as feeding an animal not once but many times. For our learners within Skills for Life, we can talk them through the steps you take to make yourself a cup of tea, but you need to do this repeatedly and in different scenarios for it to become a learned skill.

Work experience also is a vital part of what we offer. A supported opportunity to get hands-on experience of the world of work. This has all but shut down during Covid. For all young people on vocational courses this has been devastating but for many of our young people with SEND this could be their only opportunity. For our high-need learners with SEND having access to the community to practice life skills in reality is vital, ordering a meal in a café, buying something in a shop these are all skills we need our students to leave with but when the cafes and shops are shut its impossible to get them to this level.

The crisis has been an opportunity to build resilience for the future

In many of our Centres we had mental health support and resilience coaching. We used the pandemic as a way to coach learners to recognise when things get tough how you motivate and

move yourselves forward. This is an important skill, and one I know our learners with SEND will find useful in their education and careers going forwards.

The extra catch-up funding won’t be enough for many SEND learners

For our learners with SEND the catch-up funding has been incredibly useful. It’s allowed us to use local expertise to give our students more hours of practical learning. For our high-need students we have used the extra funding for additional speech and language for example but it hasn’t been enough to truly recover the lost learning time and experience for these students.

For many of the learners with high needs in our unit at Totton the extra funding of £150 per learner doesn’t go very far. The costs of education for a learner with high needs is higher, it’s not just about paying for some extra teaching time, it’s the whole support system around that learner, the lunchtime support, the transport to get to and from the college.

For many the future isn’t certain

All young people are leaving education into an unknown post-covid world but for young people with SEND the future is even less straightforward.

For high-needs students the support services and pathways we once moved them into have either stopped or limited their intake. Friendships and relationships with peers haven’t been formed this year the way they have in the past. Experiences and development opportunities they should have had outside their home and family unit have been limited. All of this has led to a cohort of students who are less prepared for life after Nacro than we would like. Many are having to repeat the year.

But for all the worry, the struggle, the set-backs and the uncertainty. We come to the end of the academic year, more determined and with hope that next year will be easier. These are extraordinary times, and they require an extraordinary response but at Nacro we’re up for the challenge, our learners are too.

Lisa Capper, MBE, is director of education and skills at Nacro.

Nacro is currently running its Learn Without Limits campaign calling on the government to remove barriers to education for disadvantaged young people.