Helping children with specialist educational needs

If your child needs special help with their learning, pre-schools or nurseries*, we may provide this through a way of helping children called Early Years Action.

Your child's teachers or Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) will discuss your child's needs with you, assess their needs and decide what help to give. You should be asked about the help your child is given and its results.

*If your child is not attending a nursery, playgroup or other childcare, you can talk to us. We can help you find appropriate childcare, or more advice about special educational needs. Alternatively you can contact your local children's centre.

Help under Early Years Action could mean a different way of teaching certain things, or some help from an extra adult. This help, and the short-term targets for your child's learning, may be written down in a document called an Individual Education Plan (IEP). Alternatively your child's progress may be recorded in the same way as it is for all other children.

If your child does not make enough progress in Early Years Action, their teacher or SENCO should talk to you about getting further help.

This could be from, for example, a specialist teacher or a speech therapist. This kind of help is called Early Years Action Plus.

External specialists may start by making an assessment of what is needed.  Specialists advise on the Individual Education Plan (IEP) and sometimes teach or help your child directly.

If your child needs a large amount of help or extra resources, we may agree to provide this through Early Years Action Plus. They might also decide to make a statutory assessment.

A statutory assessment (often known simply as an 'assessment') brings in a number of specialists to decide what extra help your child needs. 

We work together to support the needs of visually impaired children and their families from 0 to 25 years, while ever they are in full time education.

Our team consists of Specialist Teachers, Rehabilitation Workers, Teaching Assistants, Technicians and Business Support.

We provide support and advice to deaf and hearing impaired children, young people and their families, from 0 to school leaving age.

Our team includes Specialist Teachers of the Deaf, Teaching Assistants, and a Deaf Instructor.

We provide support to families at home, and mainstream nurseries and schools on a visiting basis. There are also a number of mainstream schools where we base specialist staff to meet the needs of deaf and hearing impaired children (Integrated Resource Provision).

We work closely with Hearing Services at Sheffield Children's Hospital, and the Speech and Language Therapy Service.

The Sheffield Early Years Language Centre offers specialist provision for one term to children with identified speech and language impairments.