Did you know that horse riding offers tremendous benefits for pupils with severe learning difficulties? This article considers an innovative approach to widening education access to include more pupils, including those who struggle with a real-life horse, and those with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD). To begin with, it is useful to consider the benefits of horse riding. “The therapeutic benefits of riding are numerous and as well as ...

The prefix ‘dys’ means that something is impaired or found to be difficult. In terms of learning, cognition and development in children, conditions such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and dysgraphia are neurological disorders of the brain. They can be caused by injury, but most commonly are development difficulties. So how are these conditions likely to affect your school community, and what can you do to help? Dyslexia Dyslexia can be ...

For children with special educational needs (SEN), one of the toughest barriers to accessing the curriculum can simply be how intimidating the classroom can feel. With 70 per cent of those permanently excluded from school also being registered for with SEN, we need to do more to engage students to maintain their attendance and ensure that functional skills are developed among all students, no matter what their situation or environment.

Does good leadership and an inclusive ethos benefit a school’s whole community? It is my view that headteachers and governors who lead the way when it comes to those pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), who share their practice and continue to champion SEND, see the benefits across their school.

So you work in SEN... but you're not on Twitter? WHAT?! Twitter is the best place to engage with colleagues from all over the world. Follow these people and try out some #hashtags:

Do you teach pupils who can’t read as well as they should? Do they skip words or lines when reading? Or struggle to read long words? Do they struggle to copy off the board? Do they need to run a finger or ruler under their place when reading? Or lay their head on their arm, to cover up one eye, when reading or writing? Do they have difficulty catching ...

  Allow me to introduce Anita. Anita is 12 years old. She is paralysed from the waist down, caused by a polio infection a number of years ago. While there are cuts in the UK that are impacting upon the level of care that is able to be delivered to children with special needs, we’re still a million miles away from the reality of life for children who live in ...

My first use of the Plickers assessment app for SEN purposes was met with mixed results. Staff and students were intrigued, but too much support was required for the students to use the cards that are provided on the website in a meaningful way. The concept of holding the card up a certain way to ensure a letter was the right way round was not clear to most. The abstraction ...

When I began teaching in the early 1990s, schools were approaching the Millennium with great anticipation for a futuristic world of gadgets and technologies. The best we had at that time was a BBC B Computer, hooked up to a dot matrix printer with that awful neverending sheet of paper with the holes in the sides. In some classrooms they were seen as glorified typewriters so that kids could type ...

Some of the most special moments during my recent visit to Rukungiri, Uganda this June were at the project at Kitazigurukwa Primary School where we spent much of our time. The SEN school and dormitories for the disabled children are already in place and so we have been working on a kitchen and storage building specifically for the children and then another for the teachers house.