Do you spend most of your time working with individual students? Gathering information from teachers and parents, doing assessments, setting goals and then delivering intervention sessions. Perhaps you run a few groups at some schools too.
However, you are frustrated and wish you could do more.
There are so many other children you could be helping, but your impact is limited to those on your caseload. You barely have time to talk to your client’s teacher and have to hope that your communication gets passed along.
Too many children with SEND are struggling at school. They are disengaged and unhappy and not reaching their potential. Some hate school and become too anxious to attend. Others fall behind academically.
Adults have responded by trying to fix the child – and give these children more individual interventions or targets for improvement.
I believe we need to change the environment and occupations not the child.
We need to make schools more inclusive places so that all children can thrive. Instead of locating the problem within the child, as with the medical model, and working on skill improvement or behaviour modification, we need to be adapting the environment – which includes the school culture, staff awareness as well as the physical environment.
We are uniquely equipped to help schools become more inclusive.
This website provides blog articles, resources and books which I hope will help you on your journey to becoming an inclusive therapist.
A Whole School Approach – Taking the Tiered Model Further
Hopefully you are familiar with the Royal College of Occupational Therapists call for a move towards a tiered approach of provision. Traditionally, Occupational Therapists have focused on specialist provision (working with individual children), but there needs to be more universal provision in schools in order to meet need.
Universal interventions benefit the whole class or school. Interventions are occupation focused using a top-down rather than bottom-up approach and are more effective at improving a child’s participation in school (Hinder and Ashburner, 2017).
For examples of universal interventions for gross motor skills and physical activity download my e-booklet here.
Universal interventions fit well into a whole school approach. Whilst universal interventions are OT language, whole school approach is language that teachers are familiar with.
A Whole School Approach can be defined as ‘everyone working together to bring change’. WSA has some specific elements that can guide us in our interventions
- The vision, values and ethos
- Staff development and support
- Curriculum planning and teaching
- The student voice
- Policies and practices
- The school environment
- Family and community engagement
Can you see how broad your scope could be? When I work in a school I meet with the Headteacher or / and SENCo. I ask them what their priorities are for school development and what their students’ biggest needs are. Then we make a plan of how I can support them using the elements outlined above. If they want to improve handwriting we plan teacher training and mentoring, I will look at the handwriting curriculum they are using and help them rewrite the handwriting policy. We will look at the classroom environment and I will co-teach lessons.
I’m passionate about helping Occupational Therapists transition away from just working with individual children, to impacting the whole school culture through using Whole School Approaches. I believe using a Whole School Approach takes the Tiered model of provision even further and can help make schools inclusive places for more children.
The aim of all of this is to make schools inclusive so all children can thrive.
Further Resources
For more on applying the Whole School Approach in practice, see a presentation I did at the CYPF Conference in 2022:
We have a role in making the school environment more inclusive by changing school policies. See:
Why Attendance Awards Are A Bad Idea (And May Also Be Harmful, Ineffective and Illegal’
School Toilet Policies – Why Some Students Can’t Just Go At Breaktimes
Withholding Playtimes – A Sanction That Works?
How Rigid Uniform Policies Discriminate Against SEND Students