Case Study: SEN toolkit

SEN Toolkit

Designing a tool to help teachers better understand, identify and support learners with Special Educational Needs (SEN)

Project funded by Erasmus+ Project team led by York Associates.

Erasmus+ is the EU’s programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe.

York Associates is a training provider that offers a full range of courses from language to leadership, at our training centre in York and around the world.

Challenge

In general, students with acute special educational needs (SEN) are given adequate support in specialist schools, while students with less severe, “category B” SEN are often integrated into mainstream classrooms, where they receive limited support. This means that millions of young people around the world are not getting the support that they need to help them grow, develop and prosper in society. This disservice is system-wide, but a significant factor is the lack of training that teachers have in understanding, identifying and supporting the various needs and neurodiversity that exist in the classroom. This Erasmus+ funded project, led by York Associates, set out to tackle this challenge by designing and building the SEN Toolkit, a set of online resources for teachers in mainstream schools in the European Union.

Questions

The project set out to do a number of things:

Define the syllabus, content and learning design of an online self-study tool
Create content and author it into the tool
Define a ‘train the trainer’ programme to increase the impact of the tool

LearnJam’s role in the project was to lead on the learning design and the definition of the technical aspects of the tool. This involved:

Development of teacher personas and understanding of the problem space
Workshops with York Associates and SEN subject matter expert to define the module structure and syllabus
The creation of briefs for partners to write sample content
Identification of the key features and functionality and user journey of the online tool, ready for development

Throughout the LearnJam tasks and responsibilities, we used our Learning Designing Principles to inform the way that we were conceptualising and defining the content and the tool itself.

This was a really impactful project for LearnJam which gave us an opportunity to not only create something valuable for learners and teachers, but to learn a lot about designing more inclusively ourselves. The more we learned about the subject matter from our experts (SEN), the more inclusive we could be in our designs, not only for this toolkit but in our future projects as well.

Katy Asbury

Learning designer

Key moments and learnings

LearnJam as an organisation exists to remove barriers of access to education and to support learners who are currently underserved. This project was therefore very close to our hearts.

A particular highlight and opportunity for critical learning was the initial focus group research. From this research, undertaken in countries across Europe, we saw the same challenges coming back. Key findings included:

Special educational needs are assessed differently across Europe and there is no standardised approach;
The prevalence of stigma and misunderstanding that exist around SEN and neurodiversity;
The challenges of integrating learners with SEN into the mainstream classroom and creating lessons that were genuinely inclusive and supporting of all learners
The fact that support at primary age (~5–11 years old) was far greater than at secondary age (12–16 years old). This drop-off when transitioning to secondary school was particularly challenging for learners;
The importance of bringing parents on side with SEN support, and the challenges involved in this.

The tool is now live and freely available to access online at https://sentoolkit.com/

Results

With such an important subject matter, our approach was to define messaging that really resonated with teachers. We wanted teachers across Europe to really understand how important the problem was and how much value they could bring by raising their awareness and competence in this area. In order to do this we created a powerful manifesto as a call to action, and we introduced it over the first modules of the Toolkit.

We also saw that teachers are busy and often overstretched, so we wanted to ensure that the SEN Toolkit offered practical, immediately useful and usable information for teachers. This is in the form of lesson plans, checklists, tips and tricks to help teachers.

It was fascinating to learn so much about SEN and neurodiversity, particularly from the project subject matter expert, Martin Bloomfield. Martin shared so many powerful case studies that highlighted the negative impact on children of not getting SEN provision right, and potentially transformative impact for them if we do.

Using the LearnJam Learning Design Principles while designing the experience was also really helpful in shaping the ideas and direction at the early stages; and working with other European partners as the project progressed meant that the final toolkit benefits from a diverse range of perspectives, experiences and approaches.

Team

From LearnJam: Katy Asbury, Laura Patsko, Jo Sayers, Lucy Williams, Berta Rojals

York Associates, Blackbird Language School, Growth Coop, Babel Idiomas, CPIP, I&F,