By Gary Aubin, co-author of The Parent’s Guide to SEND, available from www.jkp.com
Read more about The Parent’s Guide to SEND here.
A successful partnership between school and home is so important if a child with SEND is to thrive in school. This is perhaps never truer than when a child is changing school.
Why is this tricky for schools?
Transition can be hard to manage for school staff.
When classes of children leave primary or secondary school, they might go to a dozen or more different settings. Your child’s school may have relationships with some of those settings, but probably not all of them.
When classes of children are in their transition year, they’re often also in a key exam year. The school may well have their eyes on exams until well into the summer term, while Ideally, preparing your child for their next school or college starts well before then.
When schools are thinking about those pupils who will arrive in September, they’re also working hard to support those pupils they’ve already got. Finding the time and space to get transition right for pupils they’ve perhaps never met is vital, but it’s hard.
How parents can support
Parents will do lots themselves to support transition – conversations about the new school, settling nerves about change, etc.
Parents should also be able to put their faith in the transition processes organised by the relevant schools, sometimes coordinated by a local authority.
That said, many parents of children with SEND will need reassurance about the transition process – reassurance that it’s being done well by both the setting their child is leaving and the setting their child is joining.
Asking the right questions
As a parent, it’s not necessarily about having the answers – schools will also have their own expertise around how to prepare pupils for leaving or joining a school. It may well be about asking the right questions, however.
When writing The Parent’s Guide to SEND, we decided to suggest what some of those questions might be around transition. Find the one-pager with questions to ask when your child is transitioning to a new school, here. Parents might choose to use these questions – not to seek argument with the school, but to gain the reassurance they’re looking for. In the book, we’ve also suggested some questions that parents might ask a teacher, a TA or a SENDCO. We’ve suggested questions that parents might ask a school at a school open morning, in the run-up to exams or while preparing to attend a residential trip.
In our book, we’ve also provided a bit of advice for parents – around morning routines, engaging specialists, developing your child’s love of reading or approaching special occasions.
One book will never address every question that every parent has. But we know that being a parent of a child with SEND can bring up some unique challenges, and we think we’ve addressed quite a few of them. We hope it provides parents with the reassurance and support that they might have been looking for.
Gary Aubin and Stephen Hull have co-written The Parent’s Guide to SEND: Supporting your child with additional needs at home, school and beyond.
Find the one-pager with questions to ask when your child is transitioning to a new school, here.