Richard B

Specific Experience in working with children and young people as a Tutor

My specialist experience working with students with SEN to develop trusting and meaningful relationships; I have worked in and led schools for young people with social and emotional difficulties (SEMH). I establish positive and caring relationships with young people of all ages and backgrounds, and in particular, those with adverse childhood experiences. This could include negativity about their teachers and/or their own abilities.
I see my role as supporting these young people throughout their learning. I have worked successfully throughout with young people who have severe trust issues and extreme behavioural problems who have gone to to build lasting and positive relationships. Within these communities young people sought me out as an advocate. As a headteacher in SEMH special schools it was important for me to develop an environment and culture which enabled the students to develop independence and personal advocacy to manage their learning lives; school councils and peer to peer support programmes were part of this. I ensured that I made time for young people and that they could always count on me to listen and support.

My experience supporting young people with behavioural needs; I have developed in my career as a leader of SEMH communities, where I have built successful and outstanding school communities which are coherent and supportive.  I have worked for over 30 years with young people with difficult behaviours that effect their learning, such as those with SEMH, on the Autistic Spectrum, those with ADHD, ODD and other similar difficulties. In many cases these conditions coexist.  In all cases young people have adapted their behaviours to make themselves feel safe or to warn others that they feel unsafe.

All the SEMH schools I have led have been judged as Outstanding and one quote from Ofsted distils the essence of my successful experience and the ideas I have developed. “You balance your focus skilfully between pupils’ personal and academic development. Relationships between staff and pupils are strong. Staff model the behaviours and social skills that they wish pupils to emulate.”

Through discussion and negotiation towards agreed outcomes, most of the young people I work with have adapted and developed their learning styles to benefit their own interests. This ownership builds their owned success and a critical understanding of how they learn. It is in the knowing of a young person and in their knowing of me that we become successful partners in learning.

As one parent said, ‘My son used to have celebrities as role models and now he has his teachers.”

My experience teaching Maths;  I have taught primary maths and worked with numeracy specialists to adapt and develop maths curriculum to meet the needs of SEMH young people within the  Primary National Curriculum and Numeracy programme.

My experience teaching English; I have taught Primary English and Literacy and taught to GCSE level in English.  As a Humanities specialist I cover all aspects of the English language especially that which is formal , descriptive and technical. I was orginally a remedial teacher and have built up a wide range of reading and writing recovery programmes.

My experience supporting young people with speech and communication, including expressive language needs; I have worked collaboratively with young people with communications and expressive language needs to draft teaching programmes that they have articulated either through written language or charactatures.
In order to overcome these initial difficulties I begin by building trust and understanding to help them find a way or ways in which to manage their own communication and build confidence. I have worked with young people who are elective mutes, those with speech impediments and those with tic disorders and Tourettes syndrome, all resulting in successful transitions to purposeful and positive communication.

My experience supporting young people with anxiety; The biggest issue in learning with young people with SEMH difficulties is stress which is caused by anxiety. All of my work and experience seeks to reduce anxiety by building up resilience and managing the expectations of the young person; I work to develop the young persons’ security in the learning process so that they develop ownership and responsibility of their learning through sharing ideas and targets for our work together. Trust develops and anxiety is greatly reduced. These managing behaviours then become transferable to the wider community.

My specialist experience supporting children to develop their focus and concentration skills; My learning partnerships are all based on a dialogue with young people. It is important that they understand me and I understand them. That relationship is one of vital importance towards developing shared learning.  It important to quickly identify the learning styles which suit a young person therefore through the use of functional analysis data (watching what they do, what works and what doesn’t work), I have built a series of strategies to reach those young people who at some time seemed disconnected to structural learning at large schools or within large classrooms. These strategies are based largely on observation then negotiated outcomes which enable my partners in learning to develop personal learning and social skills towards independence and self-confidence. My experience shows that focus and attention come when a young person is interested, engaged and aware.

My specialist experience providing fun sessions to help students engage in learning; Young people learn best when they feel safe and happy, so all of my learning activities are based on this understanding and the young person’s interests; keeping them involved means fun and games as well. Breaking things up with fun activities from games, music, quizzes, journeys of discovery, debates, making up tv and film scenes, jokes and art activities and particularly the use of IT are wonderful to have in the ‘back pocket’ if the atmosphere begins to drag.
I am skilled at desculation and distraction in the face of young people’s emotional needs.

My skills and experience supporting students to develop their independence. The foundation of all of my work is that young people feel safe, are cared for and are happy. When this happens young people will become independent learners, but also realistic in their targets and in life. Their independence springs from this alongside various opportunitites for personal development and growth.
I have worked with hundreds of young people with behavioural problems for example:
– Young people who could not read and then went into work or further education and university.
– A young person who was elective mute but became lead singer in the school band. That band then won a national competition to perform in Newcastle
– Young people from inner cities who became Country Park wardens, and environmental scientists.
– Young people who hated schools, but who went back into school at Year 7 and Year 10 and gained a host of GCSE.s
I have worked with young people who had never left their street and taken them across East Africa to speak to peers in other schools there, about their shared curriculum projects.
I have worked with young people who rarely left home onto outdoor expeditions around England,Wales and France.
I have worked with a young man who was initially isolative and depressed and walked with him and Maasai tribal leaders in Tanzania, where he spent time with them and helped organise a football game between a group of his peers and the Maasai. He changed the sides at half time and integrated the sides!

My experience supporting young people with SEMH (Social, Emotional and Mental Heath Needs); I established my practice, research and management of learning in residential SEMH special schools over 30 years, often with 24-hour programmes where all of a young person’s activities, including play, were organised to enhance their ability to manage their behaviour and get on with others. My experience has shown me that everything that happens to young people affects their learning. This also extends to my successful experience in day mainstream primary and secondary schools.

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“SAFE CARING HAPPY” an overview of my Experience and Skills

My experience as a teacher, learner and leader in SEND provision has given me a fundamental awareness of the current SEND world both in England and Wales and internationally and how young people with SEND of any age are situated in the current educational world. I established my practice, research and management of learning in residential SEMH special schools often with 24-hour programmes where all of a young person’s activities even play, were organised to enhance their ability to manage their behaviour and get on with others. As such I support young people with the  view that everything which happens to them effects their learning. However, I also have successful experience in day mainstream primary and secondary schools.

Throughout my working life I have always sought and received the cooperation and support of Parents and Carers. I have an M.Ed., from Warwick University in Special Education which incorporated my research into the support and power of parental interaction is supporting learning needs. The evidence is in. Parents who are active and positive with regard to their children’s needs provide an exponential support foundation for their children’s future and independence. I have been blessed with great partnerships with parents and I believe absolutely that those partnerships are key to supporting young people with learning difficulties.

All the SEMH schools I have led have been Outstanding and one quote from Ofsted distils the essence of my successful experience and the ideas I have developed. “You balance your focus skilfully between pupils’ personal and academic development. Relationships between staff and pupils are strong. Staff model the behaviours and social skills that they wish pupils to emulate.”

Through discussion and negotiation towards agreed outcomes, most of the young people I work with have adapted and developed their learning styles to benefit their own interests. This ownership builds their owned success and a critical understanding of how they learn. It is in the knowing of a young person and in their knowing of me that we become successful partners in learning.

As one parent said, ‘My son used to have celebrities as role models and now he has his teachers.”

My early experience of learning with young people was in recovery work or as we called it then remedial work. The process was to one of discovery and assessment of young people’s ability, through working through:

• the goals set by themselves,
• how parents and adults understood their children,
• and concluded with co-creating learning habits which would enable the young people to access mainstream learning and develop as independent learning.

The foundation of all of my work is that young people feel safe, are cared for and are happy.

My skills negotiating with young people in their learning and learning behaviours, have developed over thousands of interactions with young people in special education. Once empowered young people can become adaptive learners and improved social learners, manging the relationships they encounter in life to a successful mutual conclusion and in sustainable ways towards independence.

This experience supports young people with anxiety, emotional fragility, a lack of confidence and confusion around what adults want and, ‘why it just isn’t working for me’

By careful listening and dialogue, I have helped discover with young people, what they were good at, what they were interested in and what they were not interested in. Through discussion and collaboration young people also become realistic about what they need to do to gain an education, qualifications and develop their own skills and interests.

My initial teaching was in SEND departments and humanities in mainstream, leading me to work in a special school for young people with behavioural problems. I was called upon to develop a recovery programme for young people who in some cases had never attended mainstream school. This meant developing assessment programmes for non-readers in many cases. Through careful partnership work where we built our own assessment protocols and set mutual targets which included learning behaviour and skills acquisition, all of the young people began supportive learning paths.

Good learning resources can be adapted to suit aptitudes and within a year (in my first special school) the whole assessment process was adapted for all admissions into the school. Through this programme learning pathways were built for all of the young learners from 8 to 18.   Programmes of developing individual learning pathways are now a fact of life in SEND but were in fact our response to the impact of the National Curriculum in 1988. As I developed as a leader in special schools this programme was further developed with a new functional assessment programme based on learning behaviours and became the basis for all learning targets for the young people of all ages I worked with. This enabled us to identify a specific programme for young people with Aspergers Syndrome, based on feelings and strategies that built safety and self-assessment. Our research led to the establishment of a specific curriculum and pedagogy for young people with ‘Aspergers’, aspects of which became integrated into the whole school programme.

The functional assessment programme I devised looked at all the major learning behaviours one encounters such as, task analysis, classroom conformity, peer to peer interaction, task orientation etc and investigates young people’s modes of learning and what difficulties they evidenced by their behaviour. From which we set mutual targets for improvement or embedding. These were linked of course, to wider observations. These targets were not just figurative but sought to develop practice and define example behaviours of what we both wanted to see improve or develop, or in some cases remove. The evidence base over 25 years shows this methodology is remarkably successful.

This programme  includes enabling them to accommodate others, most importantly to understand the demands of others. In many cases time and expectations are the major causes of concern for young people and when these are relaxed stress is reduced and learning becomes a self-motivated activity. Given time and the security of embedded learning, the acquisition of skills picks up to match innate ability.

The wonderful outcome of all of this work was that hundreds of programmes of work were identified and described by my staff and young people, which I have used and developed throughout my career in Primary and Secondary with young people with special or specific learning difficulties – to some effect that means all learners.

Young people learn best when they feel safe and happy, so all of my learning activities are based on young people’s understanding and their interests but keeping them involved means fun and games as well and I always use these keep the learning interactive and engaging.

This essential process is to develop learning skills in general as it is understood by young people, also supports young people’ social and emotional needs as it builds up trusting and mutual relationships. I have used this process of inquiry and partnership work to support young people in developing initial literacy and numeracy work, problem solving, social learning and in project and topic work in Primary curriculum.  It is also useful in supporting young people working towards qualifications – in my case Humanities as the process of analysing who the learner is as an historian is the same as who the learner is as a reader or writer or mathematician.

As a Headteacher in Primary SEND (SEMH) school I have taught as a classroom tutor, working on literacy and numeracy development usually through humanities-based projects, but also physical education and swimming. I was of course supported by other specialists and I am thoroughly experienced in working alongside art and music therapists and specialist teachers in science and technology. The majority of the work was to build relationships with young people with SEMH and associated difficulties within the autism spectrum or attention deficit and hyperactivity problems. These were always complicated by co- existing difficulties ranging from Prader Willie syndrome, Downs syndrome, trauma and adverse childhood experiences, plus medical issues such as epilepsy, or mild physical disabilities. In the main most of the learning relationships I built were with young people with 3 or 4 coexisting conditions which heightened their social, emotional and mental health problems.

Laterally, I led an all age SEMH special school and worked in support for Primary, but also took an active teaching role in the Secondary phase. I have led secondary History departments and supported teacher and student projects on social history projects at GCSE’s and A level. I have taught Religious Studies and PSHCE throughout my career.

Within the Secondary and Primary phase I worked with young people from special schools to develop cooperatives that fund work in East Africa and then travelled with them to visit the schools and enterprises they supported in Kenya and Uganda. This included negotiated work on mapping, statistics, economics, sociology, geography, history and affective English and ICT skills. As with all of my work I have found young people work best when they understand how the skills, they use can be of use to them and others.

I have also led or supported activity days or foreign visit weeks and had a wonderful time watching young people expand their horizons. Education is for the world within the world and all of my students have bought into that concept as independent learners.

I maintain my research profile and continue in many networks to respond to research requests, now as an associate SEND governor in schools and as a Trustee of a Specialist educational Trust. Though previously as a member and former Chair of the National Association of Special Schools (NASS) where I was awarded the Curriculum Innovation prize in 2019 and remain in SEMH networks regionally and nationally.

I have completed post graduate courses with the Open University in Biological Psychology: Exploring the Brain in order to keep up with neuroscientific and learning development and Research with Children courses, to make sure my research methods are kept up to date.