I have 20 year's experience as a specialist SEN teacher and have a Gateaway Qualifications Level 7 Diploma in Assessing and Teaching Learners with Dyslexia, Specific learning Differences and Barriers to Literacy, an OCR Level 5 Diploma in Teaching children with Specific learning difficulties and Dyslexia. I also obtain PDA level 2 Supporting children, teenagers and young people with Pathological Demand Avoidance. With a strong focus on meeting the academic, social and emotional needs of my pupils while recognising and respecting their individuality, my experience includes teaching children with a range of needs including Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Sensory Processing Disorder, PDA (demand avoidance), Autism, ADHD, Behavioural difficulties, Speech and Language difficulties, Global Developmental Delay.
Throughout my career as an ASD teacher, I have specialized in supporting autistic students with a range of profiles, including those with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), as well as speech and language difficulties. I have received extensive specialist training, including TEACCH, PECS, Makaton, Widgit web tools, Clicker, and behavior therapy. These tools have helped me support students in areas such as visual processing, verbal communication, social skills, attention, and executive functioning.
My work with speech-delayed students has involved a variety of targeted strategies and interventions, developed in collaboration with speech and language therapists and occupational therapists. For example, I used approaches like LEGO therapy, playdough therapy, and Therapy Box, which provided structured and enjoyable ways for students to work towards their communication goals and experience the rewards of expressing their needs.
With students displaying PDA traits, my approach has focused on building a trusting, respectful relationship where the student feels safe, understood, and empowered. Children with PDA often experience high levels of anxiety around demands, which can trigger behaviors rooted in panic rather than defiance. To help students manage these responses, I employed the PANDA approach (Pick battles, Anxiety management, Negotiation and Collaboration, Disguise and manage demands, and Adaptation), which focuses on minimizing anxiety and fostering a sense of autonomy. This approach allowed me to better understand each child's triggers, adjust demands to reduce stress, and create a more collaborative and supportive environment.
Outdoor learning has also played a significant role in my work. Many of my students who struggled with focus, task completion, or confidence flourished in outdoor settings, where they felt more engaged, motivated, and open to experimenting. Additionally, I incorporated mindfulness exercises—such as breathing with a pinwheel, blowing bubbles, and five-senses exercises—that helped students develop self-regulation, attention, and coping skills.
Understanding that challenging behaviors often stem from communication difficulties, sensory sensitivities, or overwhelming anxiety, I used a patient, skill-building approach to help students with emotional regulation and coping strategies. For students with PDA, I treated challenging behaviors or meltdowns as expressions of extreme stress or panic. I found that viewing these episodes through this lens allowed me to respond with empathy, identify underlying triggers, and collaboratively address their needs in a calm, respectful manner.
By keeping a record of behaviors and their triggers, I developed deeper insights into each child's unique responses, allowing me to anticipate and alleviate potential stressors. Through this tailored, empathetic approach, I have supported many autistic children, including those with PDA, to make progress academically, socially, and emotionally.
My experience working with children with a sensory processing disorder, ADHD, anxiety and difficulty with self-regulating: More recently I have been working 1:1 with a student who was diagnosed with ADHD, sensory processing disorder, anxiety and difficulty with self-regulating. He has experienced difficulties handling sensory input which affected his academic performance, his self-esteem, and his confidence. To help him to overcome his difficulties, I have employed a range of multisensory approaches such as jumping activities, brain breaks, using alternative seating, visual schedules, handheld fidgets, visuals with pictures of sensory input choices, providing a quiet workspace, redirection, sensory box, breathing techniques and lots of reassurance. All my lessons were planned around his interests which give him the incentive to engage with activities in a meaningful way and it has proved to be a real success. I also worked on helping him to improve his self-regulation skills when he needed help to control emotions, handle frustrations and resist impulsive behaviour. Consistency, predictability and follow-through were important for creating the structure of our sessions which helped him to decrease the level of his anxiety.
My experience working with children with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and Dyscalculia: My passion for helping children with special needs haven't stopped and because I wanted to reach out to children with specific learning difficulties such as Dyslexia and Dyspraxia as well, I decided to continue with my professional development. I gained the OCR Level 5 Diploma in Teaching children with Specific learning difficulties and Dyslexia and Gateaway Qualifications Level 7 Diploma in Assessing and Teaching Learners with Dyslexia, Specific learning Differences and Barriers to Literacy. and In my current teaching role, I work as a Specialist Dyslexia assessor and a dyslexia teacher. I'm qualified to conduct formal diagnostic assessment and deliver specialist teaching programmes to learners with dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia. My sessions are based on a personalised, multisensory, structured and cumulative teaching programme full of games, interactive activities, as well as visual aids and strategies to keep children engaged and progressing.
Many children with dyslexia are kinaesthetic learners (they learn by doing), therefore I engage them in purposeful movement, using rhythm and visual activities to stimulate memory and trigger recall. As many dyslexic students struggle with working memory, and short- and long-term memory I've created many memory games and have taught students different memory techniques.
My specific experience working with children with Dyspraxia, handwriting and organisational challenges: Many dyspraxic children experience difficulties with handwriting, writing, planning, organisation and presentation of their work. Therefore, I focus on teaching different multisensory strategies such as ‘bumpy paper', ‘wet-dry-try technique, ‘space kid' to help with handwriting and presentation. For students who have difficulties organising their thoughts and expressing them effectively in writing I first introduce the ‘ Thinking C-A-P-S' code (content, audience, purpose, style) where we investigate all aspects of writing. Secondly, I focus on the planning of writing. Students need to learn and use different types of plans for different types of writing and I try to match planning strategies to their individual learning styles. Learning to plan and use planning strategies when writing is a crucial skill.
I use two different approaches to planning- written plans which are written in note form (spidergram, skeleton essay plan) and graphic organisers which come in many forms such as pictures, shapes, mindmaps, frames, tree diagrams, and webs. They are extremely effective for stronger visualisers as many children rely on visuals to help them think about what comes next and what to say when they write. Next, I introduce different writing frames as scaffolds to help students to organise their writing, build their own writing skills and reduce the fear of ‘blank paper'. They can consist of starters, connectives and sentence modifiers which offer students a structure for communicating what they want to say. Lastly, I focus on drafting, review and revision, I teach C-O-P-S proofreading strategy (capital letters, omissions, punctuation, spellings) and ‘writing detective' (checklist of questions for good writing).
During my years as a primary teacher in Early Years (reception) and KS1, and KS2 in private and state settings I realised that my passion was helping children with special learning difficulties and children with Global developmental delays. I always made sure that all my students were able to progress and maximize their potential, by incorporating a range of communication methods into teaching sessions with the flexibility to change and develop educational activities. With some of my students, I used visual timetables, prompts gestures, Makaton, written instructions to reinforce the spoken words and to aid understanding, social stories, interactive games and lots of practical hands-on activities. I supported students in accessing the curriculum through scaffolding activities, breaking down tasks and instructions into manageable chunks, with step-by-step symbols and picture cards to back up short, clear verbal explanations.
I always took into account the interests of my students and planned lessons so that they were full of a variety of engaging activities. For instance, very often in my teaching, I used role-play which I found an extremely strong method in helping my students to develop their social and communication skills, and emotional skills and often improve their self-confidence. To be able to imagine a different world through creative play is a very important feature when it comes to expanding thought patterns, developing language, sharing, and expressing themselves, as well as empathy for each other.
My general specialist SEN teaching experience, teaching Early Years (reception) and KS1, KS2: I've had the privilege to teach and take part in an incredible journey that children go on in those first few years in school settings. I loved teaching phonics, reading and early math through creative role-play. To a child, play is serious work and the motivation to learn is intrinsic. Teaching phonics and reading was always a rewarding part of being an Early Years teacher as I helped many children to open the doors to an amazing world of books, different worlds and all learning. I helped to run the phonics and early math workshop to support parents in understanding how their children learn. My phonics and math sessions are fun sessions involving lots of speaking, listening, investigation and games.
My skills and experience teaching reading, phonics and maths: Reading is one the most important life skills that serves as a basic building block for learning, regardless of the school subject. I strongly believe that all SEN children are capable of learning to read and I always have high expectations of my students. The key to success is to use the right approach and strategies. Therefore I always create a personalised, structured and cumulative phonics programme for my students. I use the ‘80/20' rule. The balance of 80% revision/overlearning with only 20% new learning introduced has been found to be the most effective. This overlearning will provide enough consolidation opportunities to allow learning to be transferred to long-term memory so that the student can retain information more easily. I do multi-sensory teaching with small incremental steps delivered one at a time and plenty of opportunities for repetition, so learners can proceed at their own pace and receive positive reinforcement as they learn. I teach a range of strategies to help children learn letter sounds and spelling rules.
As an SEN teacher, I support children who struggle with math by using various approaches tailored to their individual needs, such as hands-on activities, visual aids, and interactive games, to make learning engaging and accessible.
My experience working with children with writing challenges and reluctant writers: Since many of my MLD students struggled with writing exercises I planned a lot of activities that helped them to develop fine motor skills- muscle control in their hands and shoulders (grasp and release with tweezers, tongs, screwing/unscrewing lids, paper tearing, finger games etc). I also ensured that I included activities which particularly aid in the development of gross and core skills (such as hopscotch, target tossing in phonics, jumping, and skipping to teach counting in 2s, 5s, math scavenger hunts...) All these exercises helped to improve hand/eye coordination, the strength of hand, wrist, shoulder, and arm; balance, body and spatial awareness of my students. Many students, especially boys, find writing very challenging and they become soon reluctant writers. To help my students overcome the fear and ‘hate' of writing I experiment with different strategies. I always try to choose a topic that gets a student excited and gives him authentic writing experiences. I often incorporate art into writing. First, I ask the student to draw his pictures, then label them, write the sentences and then short paragraphs. The key is to break down the task of writing into achievable parts. Sometimes I give the student a camera and let him tell a story through his pictures and then have him write captions for each image. Another strategy I use is guided writing where I do the physical activity and the student helps me to think of and organise the sentences and reminds me of the rules we are working on. Many boys love comics, so drawing and writing comic strips is another way I use to promote enjoyable writing experiences, especially if we turn their comics into their own books.
