For general services, training, communication and resources for schools please go to the Kirklees Business Solutions website.
Schools are essential in helping us to achieve the three obsessions identified through the Our Kirklees Futures commission: inclusion, equity and resilience. This document is intended to support schools with achieving our shared ambition around providing the best education possible for all children in our care.
We know teachers want to ensure all children can access, participate and succeed in their lessons, and that there are times when this can be particularly challenging to achieve for some children. We also know teachers want help with ideas and approaches which can meet a diverse range of needs.
This document provides a comprehensive range of strategies to help teachers remove barriers to learning. It has been created as an Audit Tool because schools told us they wanted it to be a practical, user-friendly working document that teachers can revisit time after time. They also wanted to use it flexibly, either by individual teachers or across a department, school or groups of schools such as a MAT.
Our aim is to make a lasting difference in outcomes for children and young people - enabling all children to feel they belong in every lesson, can fully engage in learning and ultimately feel successful.
Jo-Anne Sanders - Service Director for Learning and Early Support
This is the first of a suite of materials designed to assist schools in the development of their arrangements for identifying, assessing and making provision for learners with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
This Audit Tool aims to support schools to use their best endeavours to evaluate, build and enhance their universal offer of inclusive high quality teaching for learners with SEND within the day-to-day classroom context and enable a consistency of good practice. It has been developed primarily to support mainstream schools including academies and free schools in Kirklees, but will also be useful to other professionals across education, health and social care who work with schools in supporting learners with SEND.
It is focused on the inclusive high-quality teaching offer and not on the additional and/or different provision; updated guidance on this area of school practice is in development. There is a wide range of information and advice available for teachers on the SENDCO and Professional area of the Local Offer. Support is also available from the Inclusion Support Offer, who can help to discuss concerns you may have around SEND.
It is important to acknowledge that this Audit Tool has a value beyond learners with SEND alone; good teaching for learners with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities is good teaching for all. It can be used as a valuable tool for individual teachers, departments, key stages and whole-school monitoring and improvement activities. It can also be incorporated as a useful tool as part of school-to-school peer review and support activities.
The SEND Code of Practice, 2015 states that settings must ‘use their best endeavours to make sure that a child with SEN gets the support they need – this means doing everything they can to meet children and young people’s SEN.’ (para 6.2). The Equality Act (2010) also states that: “[Schools,] must make reasonable adjustments, including the provision of auxiliary aids and services, to ensure that disabled children and young people are not at a substantial disadvantage compared with their peers...”
This is also echoed in the 2019 Ofsted inspection handbook, which states that ‘Inspectors will evaluate the experience of particular individuals and groups… For pupils with SEND, this will include ensuring that appropriate reasonable adjustments are made in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 and the SEND Code of Practice.’ (Ofsted 2019, Paragraph 208). Furthermore, this guidance, is aligned to the National Curriculum (2013) inclusion statement that states ‘With the right teaching, that recognises their individual needs, many disabled children and young people may have little need for additional resources beyond the aids which they use as part of their daily life....’(4.4).
(all links open in new window)
You can access the Kirklees Inclusive High Quality Teaching Audit Tool by clicking the link below, it will open a PDF in a new window, or you can right click it and save the toolkit to your computer.
Kirklees Inclusive High Quality Teaching Audit Toolkit (open PDF in new window)
Resources to support the use of the Kirklees Inclusive High Quality Teaching Toolkit can be found on the associated resource page.
Kirklees Inclusive High Quality Teaching Toolkit - resources
