If you suspect your child might benefit from specialist SEND support, it can be difficult to know when and how to seek help. Our SEND expert Silja Turville explains the key markers to look out for, and suggests how parents can come up with a plan to ensure their son or daughter gets the best possible help both inside and outside the classroom.
What are the signs?
Additional learning-related needs can present themselves in a variety of ways. Sometimes the first sign is a sense of unease that something is going on for your child. We would always recommend parents pay attention to these feelings whether their son or daughter has an additional learning need or not. Being curious about what has prompted this feeling is the best place to start and, ideally, talk to your child from the outset about what is happening for them at school or with their schoolwork.
Signs that something is going on could include a change in your child’s demeanour: are they less talkative? Are they more withdrawn? This might be a normal reaction or an indication your son or daughter has hit the teenage years, but this could also be a sign that they are not happy in school, are having a hard time or struggling with their learning. Are they having trouble with friends or experiencing more difficulties than others in their friendships?
Other indications can include taking much longer to complete homework for some subjects, results being significantly lower than what you think they can achieve or reluctance to attend school. Sometimes, parents are told their children are struggling to focus well in certain classes – they might fidget more than others, forget the right books/equipment they need or have trouble with spelling.
At times, difficulties with schoolwork can show up in behaviour and emotional regulation at school or at home and an unwillingness to go to school can be because there are unmet needs that are causing your child issues.
We recommend that parents discuss the areas that they are concerned about with the school or the relevant teachers and, if need be, the SENDCo.
Hopefully your child’s school will make suggestions about what can be done to help your son or daughter. Ideally, this would be enough – unless there is a greater need for support, or the situation does not improve.
However, if you are still not convinced or there is not as much progress as you are expecting, it is worth finding out more.
Diagnosis and making a support plan
If a diagnosis or more information about the difficulty would be helpful, it is worth investigating first – preferably with support from your child’s school – which type of professional would be best placed to help. For learning-related difficulties in general, an educational psychologist can be an early step. However, if there are sensory difficulties or speech and language issues, an occupational therapist or speech and language therapist could be more useful.
It is worth bearing in mind that for assessment of dyslexia, for example, the child should see a GP first and have a vision check; for speech and language difficulties, the first step is often a hearing test. For dyslexia, some educational psychologists will not assess this until specified literacy interventions have been tried – so it is worth checking with the professionals what the prerequisites are for identifying conditions. It can be disappointing to find that after an assessment, vital areas have not been checked fully or a diagnosis is not being made when it is needed for support to be provided.
For some conditions, such as an assessment for ADHD, this is undertaken by a psychiatrist and for assessments of social communication areas such as autism, best practice is for this to be carried out by a specialist multidisciplinary team and not all psychiatrists/educational psychologists may be able to do this. An educational psychologist should be able to identify if there are social communication difficulties (such as those observed in learners who are autistic) and this could be an initial move towards a diagnosis if needed and/or appropriate.
While educational psychology reports can be helpful where difficulties and barriers to learning are correctly identified, they do not always provide a clear plan for provision that is practical enough for SENDCos or teachers to translate into the classroom.
If this is the case, a coherent plan for educational support in class can be helpful. This could be produced by an educational specialist with the background of, say, a specialist advisory teacher or a SENDCo to pinpoint the strategies that would best work for that individual child and to identify key priorities.
Our top recommendation for parents is to be curious about any signs of difficulty that they notice. These may not always be indicative of additional learning needs and the difficulties may not always rise to the level of a diagnosis, but understanding your child better and how they learn is helpful in any event.
For more specialist help and support, visit our dedicated SEND page or book a slot with one of our advisors here.