My Story (so far)

I have worked with hundreds of different students; all with very different and sometimes very challenging needs.

My early career specialisms as a HIgher Level Teaching Assistant (HLTA) included NVQ level III Special Needs Assistant Certificate, accreditation in Understanding, Supporting and Managing Dyslexia as well as Working With Learners With ASD.

 

Seeing lots of children in school settings with troubled or traumatic home lives I became interested in children with different attachment styles and how it affected their behaviour. After completing formal training in Attachment and Trauma I became the Lead Behaviour Professional for a local primary school, which gave me the opportunity to work more closely with parents and other professionals including; educational psychologists, social workers, outreach teams and specialist dyslexia and autism teams.

By 2010 I had undertaken additional professional training in Trauma and Attachment-based Learning and I made the decision to take up a position in a local 3-19 special school where I could focus more closely on the varied needs of a very wide range of pupils. This incredibly rewarding environment and group of people helped me to understand many difficulties that the children faced and after a short time I took up the position of Interventions Co-ordinator, a role that allowed me to really dig down and understand what children needed to survive and thrive in education.

 

Further professional development came in the form of training with AKAMAS and attending a seminal lecture by the world-renowned clinical psychologist Dan Hughes, which only served to increase my passion to devise plans and ways of working that could help some of our most troubled and vulnerable children.

 

In 2015 I was approached by the local Primary Behaviour Partnership, who had heard about my interventions work, to consult on some of the most challenging cases in local primary schools. These children, some at risk of exclusion, had very few coping or regulation strategies and had a number of different problems including ASD, PDA, ODD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, attachment and trauma difficulties and more. School staff and parents were desperate for practical hands-on advice that they could use to help these children. Armed with the vast amount of training, practical experience and empathy I’ve been so fortunate to gain over the years I set out to create personalised learning pathways for these vulnerable children.

 

It was whilst carrying out this challenging yet intensely rewarding work that I accidentally stumbled upon what was to be a significant piece of the puzzle as to why some of the children could not settle to learn, despite the Herculean efforts of staff. Whilst observing a Y4 for child for the Behaviour Partnership I was struck by the amount of movement he sought over a very short space of time for what appeared to be no reason at all. He was more than capable of carrying out the given tasks but still needed to move, disrupting his own learning and that of his peers. After watching him closely and looking at all of his behaviours it became clear his sensory preferences were mismatched with the kind of learning environment he was in. Sitting passively at a desk for long periods was pushing his sensory threshold over a limit from which she had no ‘tools’ to return, to be able to access the learning provision.

 

Intrigued by this I sought out further information and in 2017 I undertook further professional training around unpicking sensory preferences and their effects on learning and behaviour – another key building block in my professional world. As a result I set up my own educational advisory service, Sensory Solutions, to help schools and parents look at a child-centred preferences along with any other presenting factors and try to adjust their environment and learning to better suit their needs.

 

In 2019 each school in the local area the total of 18 schools were asked to pick one child who would they like me to observe and advise on to give strategies that could be implemented within the daily routine. This has been incredibly informative and when all the findings were collated it was obvious that sensory preferences were just a very small part of the world of these children. Subsequently from that work I have fine-tuned my procedures when working out the child’s needs and it has become what I see as a whole-child approach; Personalised Learning, Attachment and Nurture (PLAN), taking into account things like preferred learning styles, interpersonal relationships medical needs, sensory preferences and attachment needs along with many more (see the jigsaw below). The PLAN approach also includes a re-framing of the challenging behaviours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All in all, in the last 24 years I’ve been on an often exhausting and challenging but incredibly informative, rewarding and unmissable journey to get to the place I am now. Ultimately it has been a journey that I would not have missed for the world and one which I hope will continue for many years to come.