A new online portal aims to provide teachers and support staff with a wide range of resources and e-training opportunities to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The Transforming Education portal is a one-stop-shop resource hub featuring specialist SEND courses, SEN toolkits, newsletters as well as helpful information for parents and carers — all free to schools to access. Bringing all the council’s SEND resources together in one central place for schools to access was a priority for Naomi Carter following her appointment as service director for education, inclusion and access earlier this year. She said:
“School leaders are telling us that schools are becoming more complex in terms of the things they’re dealing with, from social care to safeguarding issues, and one of our number one priorities is special educational needs. “As a council we are committed to putting SEND needs at the forefront of all of our work. “We have set up an online portal to host all of our resources related to the transformation work we’re doing around the education system; we’re hoping Island schools will access these resources to help meet the needs of more complex learners.”
New topics will be regularly added to the portal which already boasts an impressive variety of material, including:
- Five e-learning SEND modules to develop skills and knowledge for continued professional development;
- A range of support for speech, language and communication needs, including training courses, quick links and specialist resources;
- Parent/carer guides for schools to host on their own websites or to print and circulate to parents;
- Presentation slides and resources from recent Transforming SEND conferences;
- SEN newsletters providing a wealth of information and sign-posting for further support for teachers;
- The council’s own termly Education Matters newsletter with articles from local schools.
The new digital platform supports the council’s draft Education Strategy — which aims to ensure every child receives a high-quality education whatever their needs and circumstances — and has been welcomed by Island heads as a positive step. Jane Wilford, headteacher at Wootton Primary School, said:
“Having a platform we can tap into, to find information as well as undergo training, will better equip us to support every child in our classrooms. “Whether you’ve been teaching for a year or many years, to constantly refresh your understanding — to look at the very latest research and new approaches — I think is crucial.”
Councillor Jonathan Bacon, Cabinet member for children’s services, added:
“We hope the Transforming Education portal will provide a one-stop-shop, with rich and useful resource for all across our school system. This will help us to achieve our vision for education across the Island as we: Create Change Together.”
Parents of children who will in 99% of cases will be a drain both financially and in terms of having a team of ‘helpers’ for their entire lives should be paying for additional support.
These parents are ironically given way more in benefit for having a SEN child, and that money should be used to fund extra help for their child.
The extra they receive isn’t a sympathy payment but rather extra to fund their child’s needs that they aren’t able or can’t be bothered to provide themselves.
Seems a case of having their cake and eating it too.
you make it sound like the parents actively choose to have a child with special educational needs…
Your words and thoughts not mine.
Parents clearly don’t want a SEN child, hence they don’t wish to home educate, and welcome schools and helpers entertaining them as much as possible.
Yet my take is the parents are, as are mainstream schools, more than happy to take the extra funding that having a SEN provides both.
With disability car, extra money, all I am saying is the parents should use that money to pay for extra help, for that is why they get extra.
Charity not tax payers should fund any entertainment and days out.
Tax payers are hard pressed but the useless albeit not their fault get ever more
“Why do you walk like you got cramp in your leg, when really you talk like you got cramp in your heart” – Tempa T
A breath of fresh air view mirroring my own take on these parents who demand that the sen child they bred has the right to go to schools that were constructed for normal children, but costs tax payers a fortune in having to convert such schools to make them safe and accessible for sub normal behaved children.
Yet we still have to have special schools as well for those not attending main-stream schooling.
The parents arrive in brand new cars, with a parking area, all funded by us, to inflict an often disruptive, cumbersome child which can never be chastised as it uses the fact it’s sen to behave just how it wants.
Schools welcome such, only as they receive more funding from central Government for these costly students.
What is truly worrying is what you are doing hanging around outside of schools.
A sad fact that with more & more people taking drugs now, we are seeing a massive increase in children born with mental defects.
Add to that the diminishing standards of parenting by a parent or parents with drugs being their main concern, not their child’s welfare or learning, then wet nursing, literally from cradle to grave, what they bring into the world is a huge burden on society.
Sadly for many it doesn’t end when they leave the rudimental education some obtain. For often unemployable the state will be funding them forever.
So we need to spend more on bright children who will be paying taxes for these unfortunates, & limit expenditure on ne’re do wells as they will take, yet never put into the pot.