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.