Burnwood Nursery School is located in Chell Heath, Stoke-on-Trent. Multiple deprivation scores put us in the top 10 to 20 per cent band. But people in the area have a strong identity and many want to better themselves.
We are not a special needs school, but are inclusive and believe strongly in early intervention to support children in the formative years. Targeted interventions are a real strength of the school.
Our committed staff know the community well and are good at identifying and analysing children's strengths and areas for further development, on entry to, and exit from, nursery school. The special needs we deal with range from general speech and language articulation to cases that involve behavioural problems and autism.
The confidence and skill to identify special needs come from working closely with specialist outside agencies funded by Sure Start, particularly speech and language therapists and occupational therapists. Their initial studies have highlighted a severity of speech and language problems in the area, not just locally but in comparison with other authorities nationally, too.
In response, our staff have been trained to support speech and language development, which has helped to cut the waiting list for children to see speech therapists and, importantly, has become preventative action for children with slight issues. To continue this, we train new staff with shadowing strategies in partnership with the school's special educational needs co-ordinator.
We are proactive in making links with speech and language therapists as soon as children enter nursery. This is most effective when there is a strong respect and working relationship with local health visitors who know more about the medical history of the child before entry, and therefore can inform us effectively.
Speech and movement
The biggest breakthrough was the recognition of the strong link between speech and language and occupational therapy in the form of a Movement Programme, developed by the occupational therapists in collaboration with the school (see box).
Gross motor, and fine motor, skills enhancement have been proven to have a positive effect on children's speech and language skills. The school accordingly trialled the two programmes and saw dramatic improvements. Therefore, children can be on Early Years Action or Early Years Action Plus for as little as half a term before being taken off. By the end of last year, we reduced our percentage of children on the special needs register from 75 to 35 per cent.
To achieve this, the school gives priority to the staffing and resources in the area of special needs. Individual and group educational plans are of paramount importance. They are shared with all staff and there is always a weekly staff meeting agenda item to develop strategies to see if we need to make amendments to plans according to individual needs. We aim to deliver the targeted interventions at least three times a week for them to be effective.
Getting parents on board can be a challenge, and we have found that having a full-time family support worker has really helped. Building up relationships and trust within schools takes real time and effort, usually on a one-to-one basis, so having someone dedicated to developing this is invaluable. This, combined with our half-termly target-setting meetings with parents and workers, and the termly meetings about targeted interventions, ensures everyone is clear about the power of early intervention and, more importantly, sees the benefits.
A close watch
We believe that regular monitoring of achievement is vital to success. Our monitoring cycle starts at the beginning of each academic year. We use as a benchmark the progress and development targets of the previous year's children.
Baseline analysis on entry in September takes on board pre-nursery records from other settings and information from parents.
Continued observations from September to December, when children have settled in, allow staff, parents and, if needed, outside agencies to quickly make decisions about who needs targeted intervention group work. Individual and group education plans are then written (groups have a maximum of eight children).
Children's progress is moderated at least half-termly by staff from a different class with a specific area of learning. They look at planning; significant comments based on observations; the child's opinion; photographs; children's work in their Special Books; target setting; analysis of Teaching Talking and Pathways (a Birmingham initiative) records; Stoke-on-Trent's EYFS assessment document records; the Individual Education Plan; and outside agency observations. Each worker is given a summary of areas for further development, which is referred back to when the next moderation takes place, to ensure children are progressing effectively.
The school hosts a Networking Professionals meeting every month with outside agencies and family support workers. General information is shared about areas of concern and where improvement is taking place. This information sharing allows for a more cohesive and heightened community awareness of where resources are needed.
This insight allows the agencies to:
- be armed with the right questions to challenge settings
- share and direct settings to best practice venues
- track and support families in areas of high mobility
- develop more parent workshops in certain areas such as bonding and attachment
- co-deliver training by tapping into a skills base locally
- be a voice in the community to bid for funding to set up more specialist intervention groups.
Our next step as a school is to share the principles of the programmes we run (see box) with other early years settings, including private and voluntary, and outside agencies trialling similar targeted interventions. To succeed, it should be ensured that:
- targeted interventions fit the needs of the cohort of children you are working with
- specialist outside agency expertise is used and all children have an IEP
- continual assessment and reviews are undertaken to ensure children are making good progress.
For further information, e-mail: burnwoodnurs@sgfl.org.uk
REFERENCES
Teaching Talking by Ann Locke and Maggie Beech (Nelson)
Burnwood intervention programmes
- Speech and language group sessions:
- Hello and welcome focus with puppet
- Listening skills focus
- Specific topic vocabulary, for example body parts
- Look/Hear focus using sounds, lotto games/Language Master audio-visual reading aids
- Goodbye focus
Speech and language cued articulation sessions (one-to-one or with a very small group):
- Hello and welcome focus with puppet
- Mouth and tongue exercises
- Cued articulation exercises
- Goodbye focus
A quiet room relatively free of distractions is essential. The approach is positive, reinforces learning and gives children the opportunity to speak and listen - because language learning cannot take place until children are able to listen.
Six-week motor skills programme focusing on:
- fine motor skills
- gross motor co-ordination
- hand and eye co-ordination
- concentration and bilateral co-ordination
- balance and ball skills
The school reinforces this with regular Write Dance activities for all children (Write Dance in the Nursery: A Pre-Writing Programme for Children 3 to 5 by Ragnhild A Oussoren (Paul Chapman)
OUTSTANDING PRACTICE
Stoke-on-Trent's nursery schools have all achieved 'outstanding' Ofsted reports. A conference, entitled 'Quality in Action - A celebration of Stoke-on-Trent's Seven Outstanding Nursery Schools', will be held on 6 November at Willfield Conference Centre, Bentilee. For more information and to book a place, call Julie Brookes at Bentilee Nursery School on 01782 235065, or email bentilee@sgfl.org.uk
LINKS TO EYFS GUIDANCE
- UC 1.2 Inclusive Practice
- PR 2.3. Supporting Learning
- EE 3.2 Supporting Every Child
