Beating Bureaucracy in Special Educational Needs: Helping SENCOs Maintain a Work/Life Balance

Are you overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork that SEND generates in your school? Would you like to spend more time improving the quality of teaching and learning for pupils with SEN or disabilities? If so, this is an essential book for you.

Beating Bureaucracy in Special Educational Needs shows how schools can tackle SEND bureaucracy by reducing the need for provision that is ‘additional to or different from’ that available to all pupils, through developing inclusive environments, curricula and teaching. This means placing fewer children on SEND registers and focusing SEND Code of Practice procedures squarely on those pupils with more complex needs.

Fully revised and updated, the fourth edition of this bestselling, practical text demonstrates what can be achieved, with new case studies describing schools with outstanding SEND provision, inclusive teaching and successful partnerships with parents. The book also explores how SENCOs can effectively reduce their workloads by making the most of technology and by distributing responsibility to class and subject teachers and middle and senior leaders, rather than operating as a lone voice. A toolkit of ready-to-use proformas, also available as an online resource, includes:

• a model policy to give to Ofsted;
• information for parents, including the facts on ‘Velcro’ 1–1 support in the classroom;
• strategy sheets for all the main types of SEND;
• provision maps and proformas to help you plan, monitor and evaluate your provision.

Full of helpful and achievable strategies, this book is an essential resource for school leaders, SENCOs and anyone undertaking national SENCO qualifications. It shows how to put responsibility for supporting children with additional needs firmly back where it belongs and will help you – in the words of one SENCO – ‘get your life back’.