Changing how we assess children and allocate support
We propose that the service will use the assessment system created by the National Sensory Impairment Partnership along with discussion with staff who have a mandatory qualification as teacher of the deaf or qualified teacher of visual impairment and with the children and their parents or carers.
This will give us consistency across the different parts of the service and we will be able to compare ourselves against sensory services in other areas more easily.
This is the system used by over 70% of visual and hearing impaired services across the country and assesses children for a wider range of things than the current system including:
- degree of sensory impairment
- how their sensory impairment affects language, communication and access to the curriculum
- what hearing amplification they use or the habilitation skills they have
- the support they need to use equipment effectively
- the training their family or educators need
- the help they need moving through education and into further education
- the learning environment they are in
- how their sensory impairment affects their personal, social and emotional learning
- whether they need a sensory impairment teacher to help with the different organisations working with them.
Currently teachers of the deaf have developed their own assessment to allocate support and this is not used in other areas. Qualified teachers of Visually Impaired children have used versions of the National Sensory Impairment Partnership tool to allocate support.
How this will affect the children
We have trialled this system since May to see whether it would be successful. Here are the results:
Hearing Impaired Pupils
Of 166 children allocated to a teacher:
- 124 have had no change to their support
- 19 have had an increase in teacher support
- 23 have had a decrease in teacher support
Visually Impaired pupils
Of 156 pupils allocated to a teacher:
- 75 have had no change to their support
- 50 have had a decrease in support
- 31 have had an increase in support
The reasons some pupils got less support included:
- getting more support from their mainstream school
- their support changing when they moved to secondary school
- them making above expected level of academic progress
- their support being divided between a teacher and a teaching assistant.
How we allocate support to special schools
Currently children in special schools all have their own allocation of support spread over the year.
We propose changing this so we allocate support to the school itself, based on the number of children and their needs. This means schools could be more flexible, in discussion with teachers from the service, and use some of the time to provide things like training, advice, assessment and reports for reviews.
Children’s individual assessed needs will still be met, but the special school staff who wok with the children every day will understand their needs better and be able to offer them better support too.
The consultation closed on Wednesday 8 February.