Phonics International

Joining-up phonics support

Abigail Steel

SEN Magazine

The children in question were also withdrawn from lessons for half an hour each week to receive intervention support from a local authority service, delivering specialist intervention programmes tailored to their individual needs.

The TAs explained to me the techniques and resources they were using to support the children. They felt anxious and unsure about whether their methods were “right” and whether the children’s progress was “good enough”.

On paper, everything that was in place for these children was great. They had caring, capable class teachers, received regular support from dedicated and competent TAs and participated in weekly intervention sessions delivered by outside specialists. But something niggled at those TAs. They weren’t ready to accept that the children’s apparent lack of progress and low self-esteem was simply “because of the children’s difficulties”.

So we started looking in more depth at what the children could and couldn’t yet do, talking about them in a holistic, whole-child centred way, exploring their personalities, their classwork, and investigating what actually took place in the classroom, during TA intervention and during LA intervention. What we discovered, in a nutshell, is that everybody’s finest attempts to provide the teaching the children needed were resulting in a fragmented and disjointed experience for the children.

We concluded that a “joined-up thinking” approach might bridge the gaps. Here are the points we decided to address to make the children’s phonics provision more inclusive.