At this time of year, mainstream schools are winding down. Year 11 are out ‘on leave’? having completed their GCSE exams; Year 13 have officially left school after their A Levels and are hopefully not drinking themselves to death in San Antonio. And any school with any sense has sent Year 10 out on work experience and re-timetabled the whole of Year 9 for post-SATS sex education/long-term PE projects.

Special schools are different. It’s Annual Review time.

One child with a Statement of Special Educational Needs requires as much planning, preparation and assessment input as an entire? class of? mainstream schoolchildren. Every single learning activity in every lesson, covering every subject, must be personalised. That means that even where a child, coincidentally, is working at precisely the same level as a classmate, they still need significantly different targets, learning outcomes and activities just to make sure that the Individual Education Plan really is “individual.”

Each child needs these targets, outcomes and activities to be planned for every subject, duly referring to achievements and progress records,? and then? sent up the LEA food chain before being “proposed” to parents in the Annual Review itself, after which it is all redrafted to reflect parental input and (hopefully) signed off in time for the start of the academic year in September.

(No doubt some of the regulars at ASDf? are crying with laughter at this description of the Annual Review process, but trust me – it can be done this way.)

So far this week, a colleague and myself have teamed together during our free time and completed 7 of these drafts – using the assessment data pieced together when the whole school spent 2 weeks performing the very peculiar special-school versions of annual tests.

We have 35 to go.