Beating Bureaucracy in Special Need

Are you overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork that SEN generates in your school? Would you like to spend more time actually improving the quality of teaching and learning for pupils with SEN or disabilities? If so, this is an essential book for you.
Containing practical strategies for reducing the number of individual education plans and review meetings, ‘Beating Bureaucracy’ will help you to use existing systems for target setting, recording and planning – personalised systems that are used for all children as part of everyday teaching practices. The book showcases the work of four schools that have successfully developed ways of planning provision, working with parents, and supporting staff development. Ready-to-use proforma in the book are also available online, and include:


a model policy to give to Ofsted to explain why the school does not use IEPs


an information sheet for parents


curriculum planning formats


strategy sheets that can be highlighted and given to class and subject teachers


proformas for commonly used interventions that describe the intervention, its target group, its entry and exit criteria, and monitoring and evaluation arrangements.

This invaluable resource will help you (in the words of one SENCO) ‘get your life back’. Adopting the new and more effective ways of working presented here will reduce the bureaucratic burden on your school – whilst at the same time improving the impact of your SEN provision on children’s learning and well-being.

Jean Gross is a psychologist, writer and lecturer. She has written widely on special needs issues, and until recently led the Primary National Strategy’s work on inclusion.

Acknowledgments and a note on terminology 1 The SEN paperchase 2 Case studies 3 Doing SEN differently 4 Personalised learning and SEN 5 Setting targets and monitoring progress 6 Achieving targets: adaptations to everyday classroom teaching 7 Achieving targets: mapping additional provision 8 Working in partnership: parents, pupils and outside agencies 9 Making the change Beating bureaucracy toolkit