SEND: How Best to Identify Special Educational Needs

This blog is based on Judicium’s SEND ‘Sofa Session’ from the 13th of December, with our resident expert Rik Chilvers. This session focused on whether SENDCOs can be omnipresent, the role of the wider staff body, working with parents/carers, and your statutory requirements.

Poll 1

Why is Identification of SEND so Important? 

As many are aware, schools across the country are reporting an increase in the proportion of children with SEND. The latest figures show 17.3% of children in England have SEND.

An increase in the number of children with SEND is, on the one hand, positive. It means we're better placed to understand and meet the needs of these learners and reduce the barriers to education they face. However, it presents a challenge in a climate of limited resources for both schools and the external professionals they work with.

One of the ways you can reduce the number of children requiring targeted SEND support is through identification. The Code of Practice states, early identification is the key to reducing the need for children to receive additional support.

Statutory Requirements

The Code of Practice states that "all schools should have a clear approach to identifying and responding to SEND". In practice, this will be detailed in a school's SEND Information Report.

Although it's a document whose 'statutory' audience is parents and/or carers, it's worth sharing internally with staff too. Writing the identification section can help SENDCOs and other leaders really pin down their approach.

The intended audience for this document, parents and/or carers, must also be included in a school's identification of SEND.

The earliest you could identify SEND is when a child joins your school, which is why the Code of Practice states you "should assess each pupil’s current skills and levels of attainment on entry."

During busy periods of term, you should be mindful not to overlook assessing mid-year transitions, such as those that join through managed moves. In fact, these can be really important children to keep an eye on. As a SENDCO, when there are mid-year transfers, it's important to consider whether the move was motivated by the child having difficult experiences at their previous school, which could  indicate an unidentified and unmet need.

Poll 2

Working with Leaders 

When we talk about SEND being everyone's responsibility, we don't just mean the teaching of SEND. We mean everything, including identification.

Ultimately, it will be SENDCOs who draw everything together and make a judgement on whether a child needs targeted support, but there should be layers of collaboration before that.

This is crucial because the Code of Practice explains you should consider assessment of progress in "areas other than [academic] attainment," going on to say that a "detailed assessment of need should ensure that the full range of an individual’s needs is identified, not simply the primary need."

This is why working with other leaders is so important. It's central to building capacity within the school. Not only because they can help raise the profile of SEND within their teams, but also because of the perspective they can bring.

Two of the most important leaders to be working with are those who have responsibility for behaviour and attendance, along with the other key areas listed below.

Behaviour

While the Code of Practice (paragraph 6.21) emphasises that challenging behaviour does not necessarily indicate that a child has SEND - it may signal a safeguarding need.

Top Tip: Deliver some targeted training to the behaviour lead covering factors that might indicate a child has SEND and/or set up regular meetings to share concerns.

Attendance

In 2018/19, the Attendance Audit from the Children's Commissioner found that one in nine children were persistently absent. In Autumn 2021, this had over doubled to one in four. There are lots of reasons for this increase, but the rise of emotional-based school avoidance is one that SENDCOs will be acutely aware of. Working closely with your attendance lead will help SENDCOs identify and support children with developing attendance issues.

• the child often complaining of feeling ill
• physical signs linked to stress such as a headache, a stomach ache or sickness
• changes in behaviour such as how the child interacts with peers, lower motivation than normal and reduced engagement in class
• a parent/carer reporting that the child doesn't want to come to school

Academic Attainment and Progress

A key metric in identifying children will be through their progress and attainment data. Again, SENDCOs should buddy up with the member of staff who has responsibility for this. Lean on their expertise to slice and dice the data to provide a meaningful picture of progress.

NB: Not all lower than expected progress indicates that a child has SEND. Instead, this could be an indication that a child has gaps in their learning.

For example, a child joins a Year 5 class after having been electively home educated for several years. There were areas of the curriculum they hadn't covered in much depth during their time outside mainstream education and targeted interventions were put in place. There lower than expected progress didn't mean they had SEND, just that they needed some additional support.

The Code of Practice states "attainment in line with chronological age means that there is no learning difficulty or disability." In other words, children who are not facing any challenges academically might still have SEND. Training for staff on other indicators of SEND, such as emotion regulation and social communication difficulties, will help.

Likewise, SENDCOs need to take care when considering whether children with EAL also have SEND. There are many factors that can affect the progress of a child with EAL and you need to be careful that, on the one hand, they aren't erroneously taken as indicators of SEND and, on the other, they don't mask an additional need.

Top Tip: Explore the possibility of cognitive tests in the child's first language or consider whether non-verbal tests would be appropriate. Remember that low scores in English cognitive tests for as much as 2 years after the child joins the English education system can be attributed to them having EAL, not SEND.

Polls 3 and 4 

The Role of Teachers and External Professionals 

External professionals can play a key role here. You might ask SaLTs or EPs, for example, to offer training to your teaching staff - or to support in developing training. The goal is to raise awareness of certain needs and of how high quality, adaptive teaching can meet these. This can also be seen as an efficiency measure as, in this model, more children receive specialist support.

Using  Developmental Language Disorder as an example, around 7% of children have DLD, with around 85% of those being unidentified. Training can enable your teachers to meet the needs of these children in the classroom, rather than through an intervention.

It's a way of using external professionals as a preventative measure. You can make them central to your wave one provision/universal offer, not just as features of targeted and specialist provision.

As a SENDCO, when a child is identified as having SEND through the behaviour route, it is worth questioning  whether there was an underlying need that could have been caught earlier.

Coming back to teaching staff, think carefully about how they can raise concerns with you. Some schools use a single point of referral for all concerns: behaviour, learning needs, mental health needs, safeguarding, etc. These are then triaged and reviewed by the pastoral team to ensure that a holistic understanding of the child informs any actions. Whether this would work for you will be specific to your setting.

Regardless, asking the member of staff to detail what support is already in place, the impact of that support and what next steps they'd like to see is helpful on SEND referral forms. This prompts the referrer to engage a little more with the process and helps them to start thinking in terms of the assess, plan, do, review cycle they'll be contributing to.

It's also worth considering the preconceptions your staff might have about certain needs, as this will affect the referrals they make.

For example, in an area where the local authority are working to address the fact that children of African, Caribbean and mixed heritage were over-represented in SEMH-related referrals, your school could tackle this in two ways:

1. Organise unconscious bias training for staff in order to reduce the risk of preconceptions affecting referrals
2. Deliver extra training on SLCN, given the overlap between DLD and SEMH

Working with Parents and/or Carers

If you suspect that a child has SEND, it's your responsibility to let parents and carers know and involve them in the process of identification. As the SEND Code of Practice rightly points out, they are an invaluable asset in understanding the challenges their child is facing.

Just as SENDCOs take on the role of a detective when considering whether a child has SEND, so too must parents and carers piece together a range of information to help them understand their child's progress. It's important - particularly in early years and primary settings where parents may not have deep experience of working with education professionals - to consider what information you share with them and the manner in which you do. 

For example, you can utilise external professionals to deliver coffee mornings. In this way, you can upskill parents and carers to understand both how to identify and how to support particular needs. 

Again, your teaching staff will play a significant role here. In fact, the Code of Practice recognises that "conducting discussions [around issues relating to SEND] effectively involves a considerable amount of skill." Consider offering training to your teachers ahead of parents' evening which equips them with the skills to manage conversations around SEND.

Top Tip: Roleplays work best for this kind of training

Final Takeaway 

SENDCOs don't need to be omnipresent, omniscient or omni-anything! What they need to do is:

1. Build capacity throughout the school by developing their staff's knowledge and skills for identifying SEND
2. Work closely with parents/carers
3. Consider changing their use of professionals to enhance their universal provision.

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