School Age (Y1 - Y11)

Expectations for all schools/settings

High-quality teaching is in place to support all CYP, including those with SEND, to learn and make progress.

What this may include/ look like

• Establish strong, positive relationships between staff and CYP, with adults taking time to talk to CYP and listen to them and building on their strengths and identifying what they need in the moment.
• Teachers have high expectations for all CYP regardless of their needs and use appropriate assessment to set ambitious targets.
• Ensure a broad and balanced curriculum is available and made accessible to all CYP.
• Plan lessons which have clear and achievable objectives (understood by CYP and referred to by staff).
• Ensure teaching builds on what CYP already know, can do and understand.
• Anticipate common misconceptions and address these through teaching.
• Teachers use explicit modelling, including the thinking behind why an approach is successful (an example of metacognition) to support CYP with their executive functioning.  More information about executive functioning and metacognition can be found in the Cognition and Learning section.
• Teachers explicitly teach new vocabulary, including pre-teaching for some CYP.
• Ensure scaffolds are in place (e.g. sentence starters, visuals, worked examples) to support CYP to access the learning.
• Teachers make use of concrete resources, along with other visual and kinaesthetic representations, to support learning.
• Give CYP time to engage in purposeful practice of new skills to reinforce existing learning, including overlearning for some CYP, to support the transfer to long term memory (e.g. repetition, revisiting, retrieval, to support retention).
• Embed strategies to improve motivation, attention and engagement into learning activities (e.g. tasks linked to CYP's interests and aspirations, targeted questioning to maintain focus).
• Use movement breaks for the whole class rather than singling out individuals (e.g. completing the daily mile as a whole class).
• Where appropriate, create high quality learning walls which provide prompts for CYP to reflect on previous learning.
•  Use technology is effectively to support CYP achievement.
  • Technology may include instructional apps (apps that provide instruction, modelling, or practice opportunities for a wide range of skills) and non-instructional apps (apps that provide tools to aid learning, such as note-taking apps).
• Plan interventions to ensure minimum disruption to the CYP's inclusion and timetable, ensuring that opportunities for targeted support are provided in the classroom where possible, and that CYP are not persistently withdrawn from the classroom or regularly miss the same lessons.
• Ensure interventions are structured, directed by the teacher and result from pre-planning between the teacher and intervention leader.