In Cambridgeshire Inclusion For all is the approach to improving the lived experience for children and young people meeting our Corporate Ambition to enable all children to thrive. This places Special Educational Needs and Disabilities at the heart of quality care and education throughout the county.
Embedded within the Early Years Statutory Framework we find the four overarching principles that we are advised should “shape practice in Early Years” and will help us ensure that every child, including children with those with SEND have the best start in life.
These principles of seeing every child as a unique child, supporting children to be strong and independent through positive relationships, creating an enabling environment with teaching and support from adults, whilst focusing on the importance of learning and development help us to ensure that we’re putting our children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) right at the heart of our practice. By ensuring we meet the needs of children with SEND in our settings we can ensure that we meet the needs of all children.
The unique child
Every child is unique and has a unique way of playing, learning, communicating, and managing their emotions. We need to ensure we are closely observing every child and valuing their uniqueness then planning opportunities and experiences that intrigue and support them. In Cambridgeshire, we support our practitioners to consider the unique needs of our children through our Inclusion without labels document, part of our Inclusion for all work. This supports practitioners to understand the unique nature of every child and consider developmentally appropriate expectations for them.
Positive relationships
Practitioners making time to spend with every child, every day, is key to building positive relationships with them. This includes children who have externalised behaviours that we may find challenging to spend time with. Building in time to spend with these children before behaviours escalate can be key to forming a positive relationship with them.
Valuing children’s unique interests and engaging with them in their chosen activities is essential to fostering these positive relationships. This can involve overcoming a fear of spiders to show interest in a spider a child is fascinated by or showing interest in how a child is arranging or forming patterns with vehicles, whilst being respectful and avoiding disrupting their play preferences.
The principle of positive relationships refers not just to the positive relationships we create with every child but also with their parents/carers and families as well. As practitioners we need to value the parents of children in our provision as their first and main educators and listen to those who know their child best. This can be particularly important for children with SEND or if parents feel that their child is masking their natural behaviours in our setting. Listening to and working in partnership with parents will enable us to understand the needs of the child holistically, and support the child by meeting their needs, even when they are not apparent in our settings.
Enabling environments
Understanding our environment as contributing significantly to enabling children in becoming independent learners, and being carefully prepared by the practitioners to build positive relationships and develop children’s unique interests is key to ensuring our environments are supportive to our children with SEND. Thinking about the needs of our children uniquely – how does our environment support access for children who are vision impaired (can they see the edges of our furniture or definition between spaces) or for those who become dysregulated when they are visually overstimulated (do we need all pictures on the wall and hanging from the ceiling) can help us think about what colours, textures and resources to use and how our resources are stored. The environment needs to reflect not just the physical environment but also the emotional environment – how to we ensure that our emotional environment supports and develops children, especially those with SEND.
Ensuring the wellbeing of our practitioners, such that they can be emotionally available and supportive to all children then supports our children to feel emotionally safe and secure.
Learning and development
Making sure that our enabling environment, positive relationships and understanding of all children as unique ensures that all children can learn and develop at their own pace. Sensitive practitioners that understand children with SEND will learn and develop at their own rate, which may be different to their peers, can ensure that children with SEND still make appropriate steps forward in their learning.
In Cambridgeshire our Early Years Toolkitintegrates the four overarching principles of the EYFS with the four areas of need as defined by the SEND Code of Practice. This helps practitioners to respond to all children’s needs and ensure that they are at the heart of their provision.