SEND Champion Programme

🔗SEND Champion Programme

Programme overview

This programme involves the training of a strategic lead from each school to develop their role as a SEND Champion who will be an ambassador for whole school development of inclusive teaching. SEND Champions will work closely with key stakeholders in the school to implement a distributed leadership framework. This will involve conducting a SEND audit of their school, then designing and implementing a whole school action plan which ensures all staff are responsible for supporting the needs of SEND learners. The plan will undergo continual evaluation and will become an on-going feature of the school self-evaluation.

In addition to the training sessions in this programme, each SEND Champion will receive a one-to-one 30-minute coaching session with either Katherine Walsh or Margaret Mulholland. We will encourage each participant to partner with a colleague from another school, establishing a collaborative relationship which facilitates constructive review of each other’s practice.

Programme aims

A focus on developing strategic ‘buy in’ and distributed leadership of SEND across the school. The following steps will be scaffolded by the SEND Champion Programme:

• Reviewing the current provision using a SEND Champion review tool.
• Opportunity to work with peers in school and beyond to collect evidence, triangulate, reflect and build engagement for next steps.
• Developing an action plan for prioritising system and staff development.
• Coaching support to tailor action plans to school contexts and school development planning.

Sessions will include

• 2 x in-person half day training with both Margaret Mulholland and Katherine Walsh
• 2 x online twilight with either Margaret Mulholland or Katherine Walsh
• 1 x 30 minute 1:1 coaching session with either Margaret Mulholland or Katherine Walsh
• The opportunity to partner with a colleague from another school to review the practice and implementation of each other’s plan.

🔗Learn more here

Session dates: Please note due to the structure of the programme, there is no capacity to move between cohorts for each session, Primary colleagues will be allocated either Group B or Group C.

Programme leads: Margaret Mulholland and Katherine Walsh

Margaret and Katherine led the EEF RCT Trial (2020-22) of SEND development, implementing the SEND Review tool with 145 secondary schools from Cornwall to Carlisle. From this experience, they then designed a programme to support the process of transforming SEND provision in 72 intervention schools. The overall strategy developed aims to support schools to move from reactive and operational responses to a model that is proactive and strategic.

Moving to a whole school approach requires distributed responsibility for SEND across the school where every member of staff is both accountable and confident to teach all children. The programme will share the same goals for both primary and secondary and workshop sessions will be tailored to the different opportunities and challenges for each.

Cost

£275 per person*

*If your school is in the areas of Scarborough, Whitby or Ryedale you are entitled to one fully-funded place, thanks to North Yorkshire County Council and the S/W/R Locality Board.

🔗SEND Champion Programme Flyer