Our vision is that all children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) will be empowered to make choices which lead to fulfilled lives where they are included in their local community socially, access meaningful employment, are physically and emotionally healthy, and live as independently as possible.
Implementation of the Graduated Response enables early identification and a clear understanding of each individual’s needs within their school community. This includes consideration of the individual’s life from their viewpoint, and discovering with them what their needs are rather than assessing them from the outside. Getting this process right will reveal their strengths, vulnerabilities, skills, aspirations, and preferences, including what resources the individual can contribute, as well as the contribution available from informal support such as their family, friendship and community network.
The graduated approach encompasses an array of strategies which are underpinned by a number of central principles:
- All children/young people are entitled to high-quality, personalised teaching
- all children/young people can learn and make progress
- all teachers are teachers of SEND
- a differentiated curriculum is not SEND provision - differentiated learning opportunities should be given to all learners
- provision for a child/young person with SEND should match the nature of their needs
- there should be regular recording of a child's / young person's SEND, of the planned outcomes, of the action that the setting is taking, and of impact of those actions and the outcomes achieved
The graduated response starts with a 'Whole School Approach' to inclusion, where all children and young people are supported universally by the whole school, where some children and young people may need targeted support, where a few children and young people would require specialist support, and very few children and young people would need highly specialist support.
The Graduated Response and Early Years Graduated Response documents have a wealth of information to support your whole school approach to inclusion. It contains an explanation, guidance, and strategies for each level of the whole school approach to inclusion for each area of the Assess, Plan, Do, Review cycle, along with Reasonable Adjustments and a helpful glossary of terms.
The guidance and strategies are organised according to the 4 areas of SEND:
- Communication and Interaction
- Cognition and Learning
- Social, Emotional and Mental Health
- Sensory and/or physical needs.
The Derbyshire Sensory Processing Needs Toolkit has been created by a multidisciplinary team to support schools to understand the impact of sensory processing differences and to empower school staff to be able to adapt environmental provision to reduce impact, along with strategies for individual learners. It is based on a graduated response model.