The Hubs

The Aim of the Hubs

Specialist KS1 and KS2 in-school provision for pupils with complex speech and language and/or cognitive SER that require significant personalisation of the curriculum that cannot be met with the resources and structure of the mainstream classroom.

Teaching and learning within the Hub is focused on accelerating and closing the gap in Language and communication, reading and writing and mathematics with evidence-based intervention programmes. 

How the Hubs Work

The Hub will run every morning for its pupils. Lessons in each hub will be delivered by Educators who have significant experience of working with pupils with complex SEN. Pupils will then return to their mainstream classrooms for afternoon lessons, ensuring a broad and balanced curriculum. 

The aim of hub is to create a supportive environment where learning can be more person-centred, tailored to meet the learning styles of individual pupils. 

Learning Programme

 All sessions will aim to include the following steps that are relevant to the lesson:

•  Encourage pupils to seek clarification or to indicate when they need help; use a system such as traffic light system, where they can indicate the colour ‘green’ if they are ok, ‘amber’ if they are struggling a bit, and ‘red’ if they are very confused or do not understand.
•  Break language down into manageable component/chunks, to improve understanding of information.
• Repeat language and instructions due to processing difficulties.
• Use a multisensory approach to learning new vocabulary.
• Provide further clarification of vocabulary presented, by presenting them in a range of situations and provide opportunities for him to use new words in context. 

• Allow additional time - give pupils time for processing/understanding language. 
• Allow additional time to enable pupils to formulate language – using peer talk/ thinking time/ 10 second rule.
• Provide key word sheets/ sentence starters and planning sheets to aid written work.
•  Provide visual cues to support understanding of language in the classroom, e.g. pictures, diagrams, written key words, gesture, demonstration and videos.
• Provide a visual timetables, with pictures or symbols for key activities throughout the school day, to allow pupils to be able to see what activities are coming up next, and to be able to talk about activities that they have already done or will be doing, by pointing to his timetable.

Pupils within the zone are working at very low communication and English levels. To support their language and communication and reading and writing they require the following:

•  
• Pre teaching of vocabulary
• Significant oral rehearsal and language work
• Phonics support
• Colourful Semantics
• First hand experiences
• Simplified highly visual narratives with repetitive refrains and vocabulary to join in with
• Link to the English/topic learning in class

 All of the pupils in the hub are still learning to read and so need an effective phonics based reading programme to support their learning. 

Educators will be following the appropriate RWI programme to accelerate phonetical understanding. 

 Educator will be following Numicon programme to support pupil’s mathematical understanding. Numicon is an approach to teaching maths that helps children to see connections between numbers. It is a multi-sensory way of learning, which means your child learns by seeing and feeling.

 Working Together

As the SEND Code of Practice states, class teachers are both responsible and accountable for the progress and development of all pupils in their class, including those pupils who access support from teaching assistants or specialist staff. Where support staff work with pupils with SEN, the teacher has overall responsibility for those pupils and must ensure that they make appropriate progress. 

To support the sharing of information and  pupil progress the following steps are in place:

• Senior Leadership Team (which includes the SENCO) devised  the English and Math programme.
• The Zone Educators, class teachers and phase leaders liaise on a weekly basis to discuss, pupil's progress, homework, unit assessment, set/review targets,  wellbeing, interventions and discuss lesson content.
• Teachers and SENCO share pupil outcomes and next step with parents/carers during parents evenings, review meetings and any other relevant meetings.