Supporting learners with SEND with the National Centre for Computing Education
The vision for the National Centre for Computing Education is for every child in every school in England to have a world-leading computing education. An excellent computing education not only equips learners with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) with essential skills for life and work, but also the chance for them to thrive in an exciting and rapidly developing field of study.
I have had the pleasure of working with a large number of students with a range of additional learning needs and disabilities over the years, and every learner was individual - both in their motivation and specific classroom requirements. Speaking to the SENCO, parents, and the students themselves is a great starting point for understanding how best to support young people in the classroom, but below are some general strategies to help make your lessons as inclusive as possible.
Consider barriers to students
Computing can be a challenging subject for any learner, so it's important to consider other non-computing barriers when teaching students with SEND. For example, by pre-teaching any required maths knowledge or making projects culturally relevant, students will be able to go into them with a clearer idea of what is required from them, and be able to relate topics back to non-computing subjects of interest to them.
Another idea to support your teaching is to use assistive technologies to support the diverse needs that make up your classroom, such as an Immersive Reader, a big keys keyboard, or the dictate function in documents. The availability of these functions in the classroom might just be the difference your learners need to shine in the subject.
Get ahead of the game
Planning ahead for teaching learners with SEND is vital to putting them on the path to success. By identifying the key learning in each unit that every child should know and any likely misconceptions, you'll be able to approach any misunderstandings or challenges with confidence and clarity.
Some ways you can integrate planning into your day-to-day include:
• pre-teaching key vocabulary, using image-supported glossaries.
• creating step-by-step instructions and task sheets to support learners to complete activities and stay on task
• provide templates for creative media tasks
• use PRIMM and Parson’s Problems to scaffold programming activities
Draw on your students' interests
Drawing on your students’ extracurricular interests is a fantastic way to boost their engagement and bring the subject of computing to life. Using unplugged activities and the Semantic Wave, you can use different contexts and analogies to teach abstract concepts, while linking to a computational model and repacking key learning.
Gain advice from other teachers on the STEM Community
The Teacher Guidance documents for key stage 2 and key stage 3 have been updated to include detail on these approaches and there is a series of blogs on the STEM Community with primary examples for each strand.
Secondary teachers can also head over to the STEM Community to share how they have adapted units on the Teach Computing Curriculum, to learn best practice and gain tips.
Learn specialist teaching strategies with our CPD
In addition, there is also CPD available to support you further. Both primary and secondary teachers can complete the 'Creating an inclusive classroom: Approaches to supporting learners with SEND in computing' course to improve their knowledge on this subject
For primary teachers, there is also the face-to-face course 'Inclusive computing in primary schools' that covers wider inclusion considerations around gender, culturally-responsive teaching, closing the digital skills gap, and supporting learners with SEND.
But that’s not all!
The National Centre for Computing Education's updated ‘Supporting autistic pupils in primary computing’ course is now tailored specifically for primary teachers. The face-to-face course provides invaluable insights and practical strategies to help your autistic learners thrive in computing and beyond.
About the author
Catherine Elliott is a Specialist Lead for the Gender & Inclusion.