Choosing a school for special needs

Our SEN consultancy service frequently works with parents who are making the difficult decision between mainstream, special and residential schools for a child with additional needs. When the child is academically able, parents are often strongly inclined to keep them in mainstream education, believing that a special school will limit their ability. 

In fact, the reverse can be true. You may have an 11-year-old who understands quantum physics, but whose social and sensory difficulties mean a mainstream classroom is nothing short of torture. Too often we’ve seen children in this situation spend their time cowering in the toilets or fleeing school, and later becoming school avoidant, or being excluded because their anxiety is treated as poor behaviour. 

When a special school may be the better option

A specialist or special school can be an all-round happier experience for a child with autism. The environment is set up with much smaller class groups, better staff to student ratios, and teachers trained in neurodiversity can differentiate teaching for the individual, for example enabling a child to learn through their special interests. In addition, timetables are designed with attention breaks and sensory needs in mind. 

On one school visit we saw a boy who was intensely motivated by anything to do with flight but would not engage with regular lessons. Staff adapted his teaching so that he learned geography through plotting flight paths, literacy through writing pilot’s logs, etc.

A growing number of special schools now cater for academically able children who can sit a full or reduced set of GCSEs or alternatively take other qualifications such as BTECs if they are likely to struggle with the high-stakes, all-or-nothing nature of final GCSE exams.

Progression to further and higher education 

They may also support a child with autism in transitioning to FE colleges. It may come as a surprise to learn that children with special needs can and do go on to university. For example, Jason Arday, who had a childhood diagnosis of autism and global developmental delay, became the youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge University, and we know of an increasing number of SEN students taking up university places, some of which are offering preparation courses for students with autism during the holidays.

That is not to say that special schools are always the best option. Some mainstream schools can cater well for children with SEN such as autism, especially those schools which house an additional resource provision (ARP) in social communication needs, but places at these are scarce and you will need to research those on offer in your area. 

What to look for in a mainstream SEN-friendly school

In some cases, a child with autism will have other learning needs like dyslexia, and may be able to apply to a specialist school for specific learning difficulties (dyslexia, dyspraxia, etc), which will support their social communication difficulties as a secondary need. 

You need to be sure that the SENCo and key personnel at the school have a good deal of professional knowledge about autism, a track record in successfully catering for autistic pupils, and that there is a welcoming whole-school attitude towards neurodiversity.

When your child is going to a residential school, the educational establishment is only half of the equation. You need to pay great attention also to the home they will be living in while at school. 

It can be such an unsettling and emotional matter to think about sending your vulnerable child away to school, that you are shown around the living accommodation in a daze, making it hard to apply any critical process to it. So here’s what you need to be thinking about.

When to visit a residential school

Schools will routinely plan to show you around the accommodation in the middle of the day, when it is freshly cleaned and there are no students about. However, this will prevent you from seeing how it functions normally. Make a firm request to see it at the end of the school day or at some other point when the students will be in residence.

Take note of the relationships between staff and students. Are staff clustered in the office chatting together and attending to paperwork, or busy vacuuming or folding clothes? Or are they sitting alongside pupils, playing on the Xbox with them, talking about TV programmes, or helping them to email home? 

Location: town vs rural settings

A campus out in the middle of nowhere can look attractive. And for some autistic children particularly, being surrounded by open space and nature, with plenty of grounds to run around in, can be calming and just what they need. 

But all children need social skills practice, so beware sites that are too remote, where trips out to bowling, swimming, shopping etc may be a rare occurrence. 

Town centres will be hubs for activities for young people with disabilities – these should have a good range of clubs offered by organisations such as Mencap; rural locations won’t have the numbers to run them. 

Staffing challenges in residential schools

A red flag for a rural location is the difficulty this will bring in recruiting care staff. These are often minimum wage posts which make it impossible to run a car, and if there is no good public transport infrastructure you might see a large turnover in care staff and a lot of agency staff employed, which will be unsettling for your child. 

A good tip is to casually ask all the staff you come across in the residential home, ‘And how long have you been here?’ – you’ll soon build up a picture of staff turnover rates. 

And don’t be afraid to ask the care manager directly for specific figures on how much use he or she makes of agency staff, and beware the fudged response of ‘Well we try not to’. 

What’s on after school and at the weekend 

Timetables on noticeboards may appear to show a wealth of clubs every night and at the weekends. These can be outdated, or a far stretch from reality. Ask the pupils you meet which clubs they go to every week, and where they went the previous weekend.

One of our reviewers was left speechless by a school which said it left pupils to initiate outings, when this was a school for pupils whose difficulties would make it impossible for them to dream up and plan outings. 

Integration into the local community

Remember that when children are resident at school, they should also become part of the local community, and their education should include learning to use local facilities, like scouts, youth groups or church. So how welcoming and inclusive is the local area? A chocolate box village may look pretty, but attitudes towards learning differences may not be as warm as in a gritty town centre.