Six Weeks In An SEN School
- By Tiz Lockett
In the first half of the spring term 2025 I have been fortunate to spend my second placement at small school (just over 200 students) for young people with Moderate and Severe Learning Difficulties. I was excited to have this opportunity as I have spent the years prior to beginning my formal teacher training delivering interventions for small groups and individuals within a large mainstream secondary school, where many of the children I supported had some form of SEN. I hoped this placement would be an opportunity to learn new approaches to teaching maths to children with SEN, and then bring these strategies with me back to my mainstream placement.
I had a mixed reception on arrival at the school. Some students were eager to meet me and ask lots of questions, whereas some were made anxious by the arrival of an unknown face in their midst. Any change in this school has to be carefully managed so as to not unsettle them.
Over the course of six weeks, I encountered a remarkable range of abilities and disabilities. For some students it was immediately obvious that they were severely disadvantaged academically and socially. However, many students might have seemed not out of place in mainstream at first glance, though once I got to know them better it became clear that they would not have coped.
One student in year 7 was completely non-verbal and communicated using a few basic signs. His maths lessons were concentrated on trying to get him to recognise the concept of counting to three by an LSA pointing to three identical objects one at a time while counting out loud. The aim being to help him understand the idea of assigning the words to the individual objects in order. The patience of the LSA was amazing. Also amazing was the acceptance of the other students the class. They had all learned the signs to communicate with him and described him as their friend.
A student in Y11, who struggled with severe anxiety, took most of the six weeks to be comfortable enough to speak to me. When they finally did, it was to ask what to do in the case of a practice exam question that had two possible answers but only one was required. It was clear from the wording of the question that they could write either, but there was only one answer space so they would need to choose. This might seem trivial, however for this student this choice felt impossible. Both answers worked, so how could they know which to put? In mainstream I was used to the constant battle to persuade students that they should show their working, but now I found myself trying to persuade a student to just show their answer. Unfortunately, the end result of this dilemma was the student deciding that “I just won’t get those marks” and moving on to the next question that they could easily do in their head in an instant, but would again struggle to show any evidence of on paper.
In one year 10 class there were a some very quick students who treated independent practice as a race. They would want to know how many worksheets were available so that they could challenge themselves to finish them all. When revising multiplying fractions with this class I was keen to try out the demonstration using arrays we were shown at the conference in Birmingham. They were already familiar with the method, but not why it worked. When I showed the picture of the array they all stared at intently for a while, and then many of them got quite excited by it suddenly becoming clear. They were delighted to be able to make sense of what had previously been just a memorised calculation method.
During my time at the school, I was privileged to get to know and build relationships with many complicated and wonderful children, and learn to support their needs. Overall, in comparison to mainstream, many of the students in this school are simply not going to be able to access the maths GCSE curriculum. However, the majority are, some of them very well. They may face barriers to communicating this knowledge, but if you are lucky enough to get to know them, they will show you just how capable they really are.
By Tiz Lockett
Image provided by author
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