Perhaps your child is struggling at school – and you’re tearing your hair out about how you can best support them to achieve as much as they possibly can? Or maybe they’ve already been diagnosed with a specific learning difficulty and you need help untangling a knotty issue? Talk ÍÑ¿ã°É’s SEND expert, Silja Turville, has all the answers and she’s here to help: email your SEND-related questions to
talk@talkeducation.com and we’ll publish Silja’s response here (all questions will, of course, remain anonymous).
As an educational consultant and neurodiversity coach focused on supporting families with children with additional needs, Silja is director of Acorn to Oak ÍÑ¿ã°É – and passionate about sharing her knowledge to help parents support their children’s educational needs. She lives in London with her children and a very excitable Labradoodle.
To kick off her new column, we bring you Silja’s answer to our very first question:
I’ve noticed that my nine year old isn’t progressing as fast as his friends - how do I know if he needs SEND support in school?
Sometimes it is easy to see if your child needs help in a particular area and then request support and discuss this with their school. For example, challenges with counting or writing can show up as difficulty with word order or spelling. However, some types of additional need – even the better understood ones such as dyslexia – can show up in more subtle ways that can be missed or harder to address.
For example, with dyslexia, spelling may go well but the challenges can be in the processing required for literacy or due to visual stress. Cognitively able children experiencing social communication or attention difficulty can mask their challenges, often successfully, even though in the long term the masking can have negative impacts on identity – where ‘being accepted’ becomes about ‘being like others’.
We always recommend discussing questions about how your child is doing at school with their teachers and potentially seeking further input from your GP and/or educational-psychology professionals if needed. It is worth bearing in mind that it is generally advised to exclude a physical difficulty first. For instance, difficulties similar to dyslexia can be the result of vision-related issues, and for delayed speech, a hearing test is always advised to rule out ear-related causes.
A few potential clues to notice and reflect on would be:
- Whether there are differences in performance across the subjects that your child studies. Is this due to interest or is there a pattern – for example, do subjects with more extended writing such as English, geography and history feel harder to them?
- Are there difficulties with concentration and staying still in class? This is something that can be worked with and supported. An occupational-therapy assessment could indicate if there is a sensory need, or an educational psychologist or GP might indicate whether an assessment for ADHD could be relevant.
- Does your child take a lot longer to complete their homework in some subjects but not in others? Again, a subtle potential clue, but this is something worth noticing and asking your child about. What feels difficult, why do some things take longer? For example, if creative writing is tricky, is that due to the imagination part or writing the thinking down in sentences?
- How does your child seem after school? Sometimes children who are finding school hard – whether due to the nature of the environment, anxiety, the workload or the social interactions – can ‘keep it together’ at school but express their true feelings/state of mind at home through their behaviour. Parents might find that teachers say that everything is fine at school. In this situation, we advise them to talk with their child and seek to find out what is so difficult and then address this area with the school. Again, further assessment may be helpful, and an educational-psychology report can make it easier for schools to understand the child’s difficulties.
- Having difficulty with meeting deadlines, remembering homework, bringing the correct PE kit to school and planning schoolwork can also be areas where the right support can help. These kinds of executive functioning tasks can be made difficult by processing and planning challenges associated with dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD. Ideally, learners would be supported by teachers/tutors helping to plan out extended deadlines, helping to check that work has started on a task and helping the learner to develop systems that work for them. While parents often get involved in these areas, learners should be encouraged to work out ways of developing these systems with their teachers/tutors, as this models the way they will need to advocate for themselves in further study and the workplace.
Of course, there are many potential signs that your child may need support in school and the potential indicators referred to above can only be a starting point.
In our experience, if parents suspect that there is a challenge – even if it is a subtle one – they are generally correct, although some detective work will be needed to establish its exact nature and cause. So we advise parents to trust their instincts, and to keep investigating, keep talking with their child and the school – and keep experimenting with strategies until the challenges are resolved.
Remember: if you need further guidance, Silja works closely with our advisory team to offer Special ÍÑ¿ã°Éal Needs and Disability advice – click here to find out more.