With the numbers of pupils with SEN rising year-on-year, this episode of the Headteacher Update Podcast offers advice for primary school leadership teams (especially SENCOs) about the effective management of SEN across the primary school.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Our expert panel begins the podcast by offering their principles of best practice for managing SEN. We then discuss how can school leaders can best support their SENCOs and what SENCO need in order to be effective in their role.

We focus too on how SENCOs can best support teaching staff – what will empower teaching staff to identify and support pupils with SEN and where do the responsibilities of SEN lie between the duties of the SENCO and the duties of teaching staff?

We talk about who should be on the SEN Register and how this is best managed and we focus on the management of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), discussing some basic principles of good practice.

We finish the podcast with a focus on the most common SEN – namely autism and speech, language and communication needs (SLCN).

This episode has been kindly supported by our friends at Speech and Language Link and the host for this episode was Pete Henshaw, the editor of Headteacher Update. His guests were: 

• Eleanor Hodgson is the assistant head and SENCO at Archbishop Cranmer CE Academy in Aslockton, Nottingham.
• Sara Alston is an experienced SENCO and safeguarding lead who also works as a SEND, inclusion and safeguarding consultant and trainer. Find her previous articles and podcast appearances for Headteacher Update via www.headteacher-update.com/authors/sara-alston   
• Kate Freeman is a speech and language therapist who works as a consultant specialising in speech and language in education with Speech & Language Link.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Photo credit: Adobe Stock.