SEND
Top Tips for Making the Most of your Support Staff
Support staff play a vital role in ensuring the success of pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). With increasing demands on schools and ever-tightening budgets, it’s more important than ever to maximise the impact of your teaching assistants, learning mentors, and agency staff. Research shows that well-deployed support staff can significantly enhance pupil outcomes, but achieving this requires strategic planning and creative thinking.
Join us for this Sofa Session, where we’ll explore innovative ways to get the best from your support staff, ensuring they contribute effectively to pupil progress and school improvement.
During the session we will be covering the following:
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- Fostering a culture of continuous improvement
- Getting creative with support staff deployment
- How to make the most of agency support staff
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Let us introduce you to this week's professional speaker
Rik Chilvers
Rik is a Safeguarding Consultant and the SEND Lead at Judicium. With experience of primary and secondary education, he brings to the team a detailed understanding of the cross-cutting nature of SEND and safeguarding, effective partnership working and management of resources.
While working as a primary school teacher, Rik completed a master’s degree in psychology of education. He then moved into secondary schools where he worked as a SENDCO, Senior Mental Health Lead and an Assistant Principal. Rik has played a central role in safeguarding and pastoral teams, championing a holistic approach to supporting children and their families. He developed whole-school policies and systems, led on best practice and has overseen systemic change including establishing a SEND department in a new secondary academy.
