Best Practice

Assess, plan, do review: The graduated approach to SEN

SEND SENCOs Inclusion Quality First Teaching Lesson planning Pedagogy
The graduated response helps teachers to meet the needs of SEN students through the assess, plan, do, review cycle. Sara Alston looks at how schools, the SEND team, and teaching staff can deliver this approach effectively
The APDR cycle: The foundation of the graduated response to SEN is the Assess, Plan, Do, Review cycle. This is the responsibility of all teachers and it is essential that teachers understand this process - Adobe Stock

The SEND Code of Practice is clear that the teaching of children with SEN is the responsibility of all teachers, including when those children are also supported by the SENCO and/or teaching assistants.

This support should be part of a graduated response. This graduated response should be based in a continuous cycle of action and review reflecting and responding to children’s changing needs. It is a planned response when children are not making progress despite receiving quality first teaching and ordinarily available provision.

The foundation of the graduated response is the Assess, Plan, Do, Review (APDR) cycle. As this is the responsibility of all teachers, it is essential that all teachers understand and engage with this process and support.

The APDR cycle should be more than just the basis of our graduated response to SEN, it should be an underlying principle of our teaching for all children:

  • Assess: What does the child know and what can they do?
  • Plan: How are we going to move their learning on or fill the gaps in their learning?
  • Do: Implementing our plan by taking actions to support and promote learning and wellbeing.
  • Review: What has the child learnt? Consider how secure that learning is and what the next step/s are.

In many ways, this is happening daily in classrooms across the country. But in the specific provision of support for our children with SEN, too often the APDR cycle has gone missing. There is an over-reliance on pre-planned and tried interventions and support that are part of the school “menu” rather than explicitly matched to the needs of the children.

Too much of the planning and responsibility for this is happening outside of the classroom, so the link between the teacher and support for the SEN children in their class has been stretched to breaking point, and some teachers are reneging on their responsibilities. So the APDR cycle itself needs to be reviewed.

 

Assess

Both formative and summative assessments are a fundamental part of daily classroom practice. This information needs to form an essential part of any SEN support. It needs to be shared with the SEN team, not just held by the class teacher or subject department. Further this needs to be specific and detailed – not just that the child is “working below expectations” or toward a particular level at GCSE, but how far are they below the age expectation and what are their particular areas of difficulty?

This may be supported by additional assessments for children with SEN such as:

  • Specialist assessments carried out in school by the SENCO or other staff to identify difficulties in key areas.
  • Assessments carried out by outside agencies such as educational psychologists and speech and language therapists (however, these reports are often difficult to obtain and can be many years out of date; further, they rarely provide subject-specific information to support teaching).
  • Some children may have diagnoses from paediatricians or other specialists. These are a description of some of a child’s strengths and difficulties with learning but are not a full explanation of how a child should be taught or will learn best.

An effective assessment as part of APDR needs to include information from all these sources with the addition of the child’s voice. What does the child feel their strengths are and the areas where they need support – and what should that support look like?

Assessments need to be part of an on-going process that feeds into planning of how to support a child’s learning. However when these assessments focus solely on what a child can or cannot do at a particular point in time, they can become a static “snapshot”. This can disregard issues of mental health, social and communication needs, wellbeing, and engagement in learning.

Effective SEN assessments will consider the needs of the whole child. This includes consideration of why children are struggling with learning. Often the “why” is more important than identifying what children cannot do or do not know. If we focus solely on the quantifiable learning, our next step is merely to increase or decrease the amount of knowledge or times that it is taught. The “why” considers what we actually need to change to develop and support a child’s learning. This should be the basis of our SEN support.

 

Plan

A plan to support a child and promote their learning needs to be based on what they can and cannot do, while giving careful consideration of why they are struggling.

If we take reading as an example. According to key stage 2 SATs results, around 36% of children enter secondary school working below age expectations for reading. On the basis of this assessment, many of these children are given additional support for reading. For many, this is based on further phonics or another set reading programme, not a consideration of why they are struggling with reading.

The reasons could include:

  • Specific learning difficulties or other cognitive difficulties.
  • Difficulties with comprehension due to social, communication and interaction difficulties.
  • Hearing or sight difficulties.
  • Focus and attention difficulties.
  • Slow reading rate.
  • Processing difficulties.
  • That the phonics-focused teaching for reading they had been receiving in primary school does not match the way they learn to read (this is an important consideration for many children, particularly those with some forms of dyslexia and Down’s Syndrome).

A plan that is based on more of the same is unlikely to be successful. A more likely result is that children get more behind and less engaged. Yet this is the plan followed in many schools. More phonics is an easily identifiable response and intervention to support reading, so it becomes the plan, even if it is not appropriate to the child’s needs.

Further for those with literacy difficulties, the support they are given is likely to be focused in English lessons. This ignores that reading and writing are key skills across the whole curriculum.

Any plan of SEN support needs to be focused on an identification of a child’s actual needs and consideration of the reasons for them. All the staff, the child, and their parents/carers should be given the opportunity to contribute to this plan.

This should then be written into a clear agreed plan which is shared with and read by all the staff involved in teaching the child. In most schools, these targets are shared through SEN Support Plans or Pupil Passports. They are called different things in different settings. These should be reviewed at least three times a year. These plans should:

  • Be based on clear, short-term learning targets.
  • Be based on specific actions to support the child in class (and out of class where necessary) based on support that is “different from and additional to” that which is provided through quality first teaching and ordinarily available provision to the whole class.
  • Identify any appropriate resources.
  • Provide a clear way and timescale for reviewing progress against those targets.

All of this should be linked to the assessments of the child’s learning as in the following six-step cycle:

  1. Assessment: Identifying strengths and needs.
  2. Consideration of the reasons for the children’s learning difficulties and needs.
  3. Identification of actions to respond to a child’s learning needs.
  4. Plan, including the setting of clear, short-term achievable targets.
  5. Action in the classroom to support and promote learning and progress.
  6. Review of the plan.

 

Do

This is the heart of SEN support: what teachers do on a daily basis to support learning and meet the needs of the children in front of them.

Clear and effective differentiation, including ordinarily available provision, is essential. Placing children in attainment-based sets is not sufficient differentiation. Within every class group there will be children with different needs who need support to make their learning better and that is the role of all teachers. It should be remembered that not all children with SEN will be or should be in low-ability groups.

While a few children will receive additional support or attend intervention groups, the majority of support for children with SEN, especially for those without an Education, Health and Care Plan, will occur in the classroom. This means that implementing the child’s SEN plan must be the responsibility of the teacher and they must read the plan and take responsibility for it.

This support must be based in small achievable tweaks and adaptations to whole-class teaching. This could include things like:

  • Printing and sharing teaching slides with a child who struggles to process visual information at a distance.
  • Including more visuals in teaching slides to support retention and understanding of information or to make instructions easier to follow.
  • Pre-learning of key vocabulary at the beginning of a lesson to ensure children recall, are familiar with, and understand the vocabulary needed for learning.
  • Ensuring that slides are clear without busy backgrounds and in accessible font.
  • Allowing children movement breaks.

We need to adapt our teaching to meet the needs of the children in front of us, not expect them to change to meet our preferred teaching style.

This is the basis of the “do” of effective SEN support. SEN plans need to focus on the needs of the children, not merely list interventions to support them. The reasons for those interventions are the root of our support for learning and are what will make the difference to children.

 

Review

Hopefully, our teaching has impact, children make progress and their needs change. This means that SEN plans become out-of-date, and they must be reviewed. We need to consider:

  • The progress (or not) a child has made towards the targets set on their SEN plan.
  • What is working well to support and promote their learning – so that we can tweak and do more of this.
  • What is not working well – so that we can change this.
  • Are their current targets still appropriate?
  • Do we have new information and/or assessments to feed into the process?
  • What needs to change to promote their learning and wellbeing further?

Fundamental to this process must be the involvement of the teachers and staff that work with the child. SEN plans cannot be reviewed by SENCOs alone. They do not see the child across the school setting or in a full range of lessons. They need information and support from others and SEN is the responsibility of all teachers.

Further, the review process must extend beyond academic markers. It needs to include a child’s wellbeing, attitudes and engagement in learning and social interactions. For this, we need to consider and include the child’s voice.

 

The cycle

The APDR cycle can be difficult to manage in busy secondary schools. But it needs to be based on:

  • All staff taking responsibility for the children with SEN in their classrooms and taking time to understand their needs and how to respond to them.
  • Sharing information between the SEND team and other staff. This needs to be a two-way process. Too often all the information about children’s SEN rests with the SENCO and their staff and is not fully or effectively shared more widely. Equally, subject staff know what works and does not work to support children in their lessons but often are not given the time or channel to share this and feed this into children’s SEN plans.
  • Time being given to SEN support including for reading and contributing to SEN plans, information-sharing and training.

An effective APDR cycle is fundamental to effective teaching at all levels. For those with SEN it needs to be more specific, shared and explicitly recorded. This can feel overwhelming, but it is one of those instances where we need to invest time to save time in schools. By getting the support for children with SEN right, we improve our teaching for all our students.

Focusing on the APDR cycle enables us to identify what children can and can’t do and why, plan our response, implement it in a focused manner and review our impact and make further improvements. This is key to successful teaching.

What makes a difference to SEN is not the assessment or identification of a difficulty but the response we make. This requires a clear plan, for that plan to be followed, reviewed and changed to improve it and/or move the child onto the next stage in their learning.

 

Further reading