WestLea Primary School

Special Educational Needs and/or a Disability (SEND)

SEND at Westlea

At Westlea, inclusion is at the heart of everything that we do. Our highly skilled SEN team work together, alongside class teachers, to support children with a wide range of academic, physical, and social needs. This may be in the form of classroom-based support and adaptations, small group or one-to-one sessions, using resources from within the school and from the support services within the authority.

With our child centred approach, and an understanding that we all have different pathways, we are building confident and enthusiastic individuals who want to be ‘good citizens’ and achieve. We believe that Early Intervention is key and try to ensure that additional support is accessed as soon as possible. The school is proud of its ability to support children with a variety of special needs and has taken steps to ensure that all children are treated equally. As a result, the school is suitably equipped to deal with a wide range of individual needs. The school and the governing body regularly review its provision for children with special needs and ensure that its staff are well prepared and trained.

Within school, we offer a range of interventions including:

  • ELSA Support (Emotional Literacy Support Assistants)
  • Forest School
  • Talkboost
  • Numberstacks
  • Precision Teaching
  • Small Group interventions for reading, mathematics and SPAG
  • Young carers group
  • Handwriting support
  • Write from the Start
  • Sparks
  • Dough Disco
  • Wiggle Squiggle
  • Additional phonics catch up groups
  • Social skills groups

We also work alongside many outside agencies including Speech and Language Therapy, Educational Psychologist, Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Advisory teachers for children with physical disabilities, hearing impairment and for the use of assistive technology, School nursing, TaMHS and Project Me (Barnardos). We also support referrals into the Neurodevelopmental Assessment Pathway.

Further information on the wider range of services available in Swindon can be found on the Local Offer Website: Swindon Local Offer - Home

The school maintains very close working relationships with children, staff, parents, and other agencies. Indeed, partnership with parents is of the utmost importance. We encourage parents to discuss progress regularly with class teachers and with our special educational needs coordinator (SENCo).