The Additional Support Needs (ASN) Outreach Service consists of experienced staff working in a range of teams, to support children and young people with additional support needs. Requests can be made for support from the Complex Needs (CN) Team, if appropriate, following discussion with the team around the child. The decision to request support is made at a Staged Intervention meeting. If the request is agreed, a Complex Needs teacher will join the existing team around the child in planning appropriate support.
The Complex Needs (CN) Team
CN Teachers: Aileen Brown, Clare Cowie, Christine Hughes, Rebecca McRae, Fiona Muirhead
The CN Outreach Team has knowledge and experience of working with children who have complex learning needs. An ASN Co-ordinator manages the work of the team and may be contacted for further information or any complex needs discussion.
Who do the Complex Needs (CN) Team work with?
The support planned will involve a team of people working together. This will include:
- The child/young person
- Parents/carers
- Class teachers
It may include:
- Speech & Language Therapists
- Educational Psychologists
- Occupational or Physiotherapists
- Other agencies (E.g. Social work, Enable)
What will the Complex Needs (CN) Team do?
The support planned might involve the team in a variety of different ways, which may include:
- Meeting parents in school or on home-visits
- Consulting and working with teachers and support staff in school
- Developing strategies and approaches for home and school
- Working with children/young people in a small group or individually
- Liaising with other agencies
- Working with peers to help them to understand and support children/young people in school
- Offering training, in supporting children/young people with complex needs, to schools
- Attending meetings and contributing to Individual Educational Programmes (IEPs) as necessary
- Designing resources and giving support to the school in their development of differentiated resources.
- Consulting with children/young people on their learning and their need for support.
What might support from the Complex Needs (CN) (Primary) Team Look Like?
Schools will be supported to create communicative environments, developing visual schedules and timetables and supporting children’s different learning styles. For example;
- Visual timetables, which help children to understand the structure of the school day
- A talking mat to help children to express their views
Advising class teachers on the setting up of a visually supportive environment Provide, create and recommend resources to suit individual learning styles. For example;
- Numicon – A multi-sensory approach to numeracy
- See and learn – a resource for supporting reading
- Boardmaker- to create a visual support for the child
ICT is used to support all curricular areas For example,
- Software to support literacy – sight vocabulary, sentence building etc
- Software to develop basic ICT skills such as mouse control and hand eye co-ordination
- Switch access, roller balls, big keyboards, touch screens to enable children to access ICT (in consultation with ICT Outreach team)
