SEN children need to be free on the playground

Young people with SEN and disabilities are often smothered in the classroom, outside they should socialise on their own terms

There’s so much more to primary teaching than subject knowledge. It is, perhaps, distinctive in the holistic way we work with children. If they haven’t had a breakfast, we step in, in part because we know that children with empty tummies do not learn their times tables very well. If they are unhappy because they’ve had a falling out with a classmate at playtime, we help them to sort it out for the same reason.

Friendships are one of the reasons we sent our son Sam, who has Down’s syndrome, to a mainstream primary school. And as he grows, it becomes more and more clear to me that one thing is becoming a priority: helping him to acquire the social skills he needs so that he can make friends of his own, and escape the permanent state of childhood where he is unable to meet anyone halfway and is always needing to be helped.

It won’t be long before I am attending an EHC Plan transformation meeting, and ‘outcomes’ will be on the agenda. While this might be a new language for us teachers, as his mother, these are the sort of things I have on my mind constantly. And at the moment, I’ve been specifically concerned about friends and friendship.

Very often in primary schools, children with special educational needs and disabilities can be overwhelmed with those who are attracted to the aura of specialness and difference that sticks to them like glitter. This is especially the case when they are cute and little, small enough to be picked up like a living doll. Many children, my son included, who lack either the social, emotional or language skills to negotiate the playground successfully are glad of the attention.

The thing is, though, and it’s especially so for children with a learning disability like Down’s syndrome, these friendships are rarely, if ever, equal. A child who needs to learn to do things for himself can rapidly be babied, his opportunities for development lost. If we’re not careful we end up with children and young people who have no idea how to relate to each other, other than as an object of pity or an avenue of help.

When they are little, we readily place ourselves beside them, ensuring they aren’t smothered by all that attention, but we too need to heed our own advice. As they grow, we need to make sure that we don’t create the barrier to friendships, to their social learning. While an adult can be an excellent role model in a classroom, demonstrating the social niceties of ‘sit up straight and look at the teacher’ or ‘please pass the rubber’, in the playground, a space that belongs to children, it can be a different story.

Making ourselves available to be a point of contact, sort out the misunderstandings and offer ideas for games to play, is a world away from playing with them ourselves. If a child can’t seem to get breaktime ‘right’, informally excluding him by constantly keeping him in does nothing to help him find his feet. Giving him opportunities to rehearse his friendships through social stories, sensitive partnering or groupings, and clubs where children can share their interests, does.

When it comes to ‘outcomes’, the areas of learning upon which we will base our plans, we aren’t terribly used to thinking about children’s social spaces. More often than not we are concerned with classroom skills, like letters, sounds, numbers and money. We are comfortable with those, they are our stock-in-trade. But playing is a constant rehearsal of relationships, an arena within which children can practice what it means to be friends, what it means to help someone, or what it means to be equal; because when they feel good about themselves, when they feel like they fit in, they learn.

About the author

Nancy Gedge is a primary teacher in Gloucestershire. She blogs at notsoordinarydiary.wordpress.com