Inclusive Teaching

Every child had access to a visual timetable, for example, which included symbols for each subject and the teachers simply indicated what lessons were being taught throughout the day.

All pupils across the school engaged with and used the visual timetables regularly, whether or not they had SEND. Staff also found that this helped ensure pupils with additional needs did not feel singled out.

Familiarity with subject-specific words and phrases is essential for supporting children’s learning progress. However, those pupils who may not yet have developed the broad range of vocabulary or processing ability they need to fully engage with the specialist language being used in the lesson can be at risk of falling behind.

Schools can address this by pre-teaching these terms a few weeks in advance of a lesson to help the children prepare. At Charles Dickens, this is routinely done with the use of symbols.

Teachers can create word maps for different subjects, with imagery to represent terms such as ‘planet’, ‘moon’ and ‘satellite’ when teaching about space exploration or ‘circuit’, ‘voltage’ and ‘conductor’ when covering electricity.

Including appropriate symbols for each of the words and phrases makes them more accessible for children with speech, language and communication needs, but all pupils benefit from the pre-teaching of vocabulary in this way.

At Charles Dickens, this approach helped to close vocabulary gaps as children moved through to new year groups too.

At Charles Dickens a system of positive behaviour bingo cards, which included words, phrases and symbolic images designed to help children embrace the school’s values and ethos with a firm focus on inclusion, was introduced.

Every child was given a bingo card with a range of symbols displayed, from ‘working hard’, ‘listening carefully’ and ‘being kind’, which helped to get the messages across visually.

The beauty of a scheme such as this is that while all children will have a bingo card to work through, each card can also be personalised for individual pupils to encourage them to sit still in class or have a go at answering a question if they are usually too shy to do so.

When praised by the teacher, children were excited to see their game cards marked off.

Use of the bingo cards was a real success at Charles Dickens Primary, where they saw far fewer teachers needing support and guidance on managing behaviour.