Assisting and Advising
Assisting and advising mainstream primary schools with children who are working consistently and over time below age related expectations.
There seems little doubt that the last 5 to 10 years has seen a considerable increase in the number of children with complex needs attending mainstream primary and occasionally secondary schools. These are children who are working consistently and over time at levels considerably below their age related peers, despite the best efforts of the school, and who present a puzzle to teachers and TAs alike.
A considerable amount of work has gone into Equals brand new Formal Curriculum, published in December 2020, which offers an original look at children who are working within a subject specific curriculum. Equals Formal Curriculum concentrates on English and Maths, but is not a dumbed down National Curriculum; rather it puts the child at the centre of both teaching and learning and spreads out from there. It makes no assumptions about what children are capable of achieving but recognises that there are likely to be some insuperable problems that must be tackled as a pre-requisite to successful learning.
Equals Formal Curriculum
The application of the Formal Curriculum model will require organisational changes in the way that struggling children are taught, and will require a different philosophy from the school and from teachers. This is because it is very likely that the children who are struggling consistently and over time, actually learn in a different way from their neuro-typical peers. If they learn differently, we need to teach them differently, and indeed, teach them different things.
This also means that your teachers and teaching assistants will probably require some support in their understanding and delivery of the curriculum.
If you would like an initial (free of charge) Zoom meeting to discuss this further, please do email me at peter.imray@hotmail.co.uk.