Special Educational Needs (6)
[Case Study] Adapted Cycling at Ravenscliffe High School
By Martin Moorman on 22 May 2012, 11:25am
Cycling has long been a passion of many staff at Ravenscliffe, a secondary special school in Calderdale that educates children with complex, severe or moderate learning difficulties, autistic spectrum disorder, and physical disabilities.
Unfortunately, a lack of local facilities had meant that there was little chance of the school's pupils developing a similar passion - or even getting the opportunity to cycle at all.
In 2004, a group of staff members decided to do something about this.
That year, as part of a Comic Relief “Cycling Fun Day”, Ravenscliffe had been visited by Wheels For All, a national charity that aims to introduce people with all types of disability to cycling. Our pupils enjoyed the day so much that we were inspired to investigate ways of providing cycling at the school on a more permanent basis.
"Oh, is that what you mean by a word?"
By Bob Hext on 27 April 2012, 11:56am
An 11 year old boy (we’ll call him Joe), in his final year of Primary School, was being tested recently for Visual Stress - the syndrome often associated with dyslexia that causes words and letters to distort or appear to “jump around” on white paper. At the time of the assessment, which puts a series of different coloured overlays on the page to tint the background colour, he was unable to blend C-A-T to make “cat”. The assessor had worked through the single colours in the test, with no significant difference between a single colour tint and white paper. He was now in the final stages of the assessment, using double overlays to deepen the tint on the page of text. When Joe was given a double blue overlay, he sat back and said: “Oh! Is that what you mean by a word? Can I start learning to read now?”
Successive governments have attempted to raise literacy standards in school, commissioning expertise to inform policy, which has resulted in such milestones as the National Literacy Strategy introduced by the incoming government in 1997, and the renewed Primary Framework of 2006, which put phonics at the heart of teaching reading. Commissioned in 2005, the Rose Review stressed that the systematic learning of synthetic phonics was crucial to the teaching of reading, and in 2007 the “Letters and Sounds” programme was launched to ensure that the appropriate material was freely available to all schools. The present government has picked up this baton and this year launched the match-funding programme, offering match-funding of up to £3,000 to all state-funded schools in England with Key Stage 1 pupils so that they can buy approved systematic synthetic phonics products and training. Following the Rose Review, Lord Adonis, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools and Learning, wrote in November 2007:
SEN provision map
By The Key on 12 April 2012, 10:05am
How can we audit special needs provision and create a provision map? This article describes provision maps and the stages and tools for auditing SEN provision.
What is a provision map?
A provision map is a management tool providing an 'at a glance' way of documenting and showing the range of provision, additional staffing and support that a school makes available to its pupils.
Provision maps enable schools to look strategically at the needs of all their pupils, including those in vulnerable groups, to clearly identify pupils’ strengths and needs. Provision can then be planned to meet those needs and track pupil progress so as to improve learning outcomes.
Accessibility for the iPad
By Rebecca Bright on 17 August 2011, 12:10pm
While the iPad is a welcome addition to homes and classrooms, it has also been the talk of the town for people with disabilities who are finding that some of the built-in accessibility features have enabled them to replace existing equipment or to use the plethora of apps being released each day.
VoiceOver for example, allows screen reading for people with visual and literacy difficulties. With VoiceOver, you use gestures (or finger based movements like tapping, dragging and flicking) to interact with items on the screen. That means you can touch the screen to hear an apps’s title, then gesture with a double-tap to go into that app. The speech rate is adjustable as is the language! iBooks is also compatible with VoiceOver. One thing to bear in mind is that while the apps that come standard with the iPad are VoiceOver compatible, other apps you may install would only be VoiceOver compatible if the developer has designed them with that feature in mind.
Handwriting: cover the page or colour it?
By Bob Hext on 15 July 2011, 09:27am
According to a recent BBC press release, the state of Indiana is the latest in a succession of US states which will not require its schoolchildren to learn joined-up, or cursive, writing. The move is part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which aims to ensure consistency in US education and makes no mention of handwriting.
Some critics say writing well is a vital skill for life and builds character, and that there is a link between kinaesthetic memory and spelling. Supporters of the move say that typing skills are more useful in the modern digital world, and that keyboarding develops kinaesthetic memory as well as cursive writing. But whatever is propounded by theorists, the fact is that handwriting remains an important medium for learning and communication, and is still going to be with us for quite a while.
You can’t decode phonemes while they move around - but you can make the problem go away
By Bob Hext on 12 July 2011, 15:48pm
The government is quite right to support the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics in schools, and the forthcoming matched funding initiative for KS1 Phonics materials will be a welcome boost for many schools who need to invest in phonics resources at this level. It will also be a bonanza for the publishers who have got their programmes selected for the catalogue of approved resources to be released by ESPO later this year. However, for many of the people who really count – the children being taught, and especially those who are struggling with reading and who are therefore most at risk from educational failure – this “solution” misses the mark completely: like the nightmare scenario of a top exam candidate, it’s the right answer to the wrong question.
For many of these children, a high percentage of whom are among the dyslexic 10% of the population, the question to ask is not “Why can’t they blend the phonemes?”, but “Why can’t they see them?”. The answer is because they suffer from Visual Stress, which causes the image of the printed text on white paper to blur or appear to move around on the page. According to research from Essex University, Visual Stress may be the result of “cortical hyperexcitablity”: specific cells in the Visual Cortex over-reacting to particular wavelengths of the colour spectrum which are specific for each individual. Filtering out the wavelengths causing the problem enables the brain to “see” the words clearly.
