Hosting students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
Introduction
This resource provides practical support for employers on hosting industry placements for students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
Who it’s for
It will be useful for any employer who:
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- Isn’t sure what SEND means
- Is thinking about hosting an industry placement for a student with SEND
- Has already started planning the placement for a student with SEND
- Wants to know more about how to support a student with SEND
- May be anxious about offering to host a placement for a student with SEND
- Wants to offer placements to a full range of students
What’s in it
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- What does SEND mean?
- What is an EHC plan?
- SEND roadmap
- What are reasonable adjustments?
- Employers and providers working together – video
- Case studies
- What employers can do and how providers can help – checklist
- Sharing placement hours with the provider
- Helping students with SEND to learn at work
What does SEND mean?
SEND is short for ‘students with special educational needs and disabilities’ – it’s sometimes written as SEN(D) as not everyone who has SEN has a disability. There are 1.2 million young people with SEND – almost 15% of all young people; and 8.9% of T Level students had SEND support in 2022/23.
Young people are classed as SEND if they have:
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Significantly greater difficulty in learning than most others of the same age
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A disability which prevents or hinders them from using facilities provided for others
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The table shows the four main SEND groups.
| Group | Examples |
| Communication and interaction |
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| Cognition and learning |
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| Social, emotional, and mental health difficulties |
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| Physical needs |
|
None of these should be a barrier to hosting a student with SEND on an industry placement. The great majority of young people in all four categories learn and work successfully with the right support and go on to have a successful career.
But when hosting a student with SEND, it’s important to remember that they may be prevented from achieving by barriers around them rather than by their impairment or difference. Reducing and preventing these barriers gives them more independence, choice and control, and helps to create the conditions for these young people to succeed.
What is an EHC plan?
An education, health and care (EHC) plan is for young people aged up to 25 who need more support than is available through SEND support. The plan identifies the young person’s educational, health and social needs and sets out the additional support to meet them. About 575,000 young people have an EHC plan and 1.6% of T Level students had an EHC plan in 2022/23.
An EHC plan gives extra funding to the provider to pay for additional support and services that will help the young person reach their potential in education. Providers may choose to use some of this funding to support students on placements.
For example, the funding could be used for a job coach for students with more complex needs, providing full-time supervision to help them become more confident and proficient at work.
SEND roadmap
The map shows the main stages in the journey to hosting students with special educational needs and disabilities. You can:
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- See at a glance what the journey looks like
- View more information about what’s involved at each stage
- Use the map to help you plan your own SEND journey
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- Making sure that students with SEND have fair access to placements
- Understanding the student’s medical conditions, if any
- Identifying the student’s additional learning needs
- Assessing their ability to travel independently
What are reasonable adjustments?
Reasonable adjustments are any changes that employers make to the working environment or working arrangements that help students with SEND access industry placements, and get the most out of them.
They include:
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- Changes to the recruitment and selection processes
- Removing physical barriers
- Providing aids and adaptations
- Designing a job role around the strengths of the student
- Changing start and finish times
- Emailing documents so the student can make the print bigger or use a screen reader
- Providing additional support, e.g. by a mentor or buddy
Most adjustments are about doing things a little differently. They are easy to implement and don’t cost much – the average cost of employing someone who requires reasonable adjustments is around £75.
Employers and providers working together
The video shows an employer and a provider working closely together to plan, prepare and deliver industry placements for students with SEND. It features Jo Simovic, Senior Programme and Apprenticeships Manager at Amazon UK, and Nicola Weekly, Business Engagement Officer at La Retraite School in Balham, South London.
It’s in three parts:
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- The provider perspective
- The employer perspective
- Employer and provider working together
Case studies
These two case studies show:
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- How a provider that works with different employers helps them to prepare and deliver a placement for a student with SEND
- How a student with SEND views her placement and deals with the opportunities and challenges of the workplace
Provider
Ursuline High School in southwest London provides additional support for all its students with special educational needs and disabilities. Some students also have an education and health care plan (EHCP) which allows the school to give them extra support.
Halima Bhayat is Head of Computing and the T Levels lead at the school. As well as finding employers willing to offer placements to students with special needs, she helps them to prepare well in advance.
“They really need to know what the student’s needs are and what to cater for before the placement starts,” Halima says.
“I visit every placement and sit with the employer. If it’s a special needs student, we plan what the structure of the day looks like, which tasks and activities the student can do, and who’s going mentor the student for their specific needs. I also offer to train the line manager and mentor, so they know what to expect and feel confident about working with the student.”
Students get to know their placement host in advance as well, either in person or on a video call. This gives both the employer and the student a chance to meet each other, talk about themselves, say what their expectations are, and ask questions.
On the first day, Halima or a member of her team travels with the student to the placement venue and spend most of the day there helping to make the student feel comfortable.
During the rest of the placement, Halima and the professional support team at the school check in with the student regularly – sometimes daily – to make sure everything is going well. They also visit the placement weekly and sometimes advise the employer how to adjust the placement to make it work even better.
”For example, we had one student with attention deficit. So the school advised the placement line manager to split the day up into quite small chunks of activity with some breaks in between rather than having a long period of activity.”
The results of this close collaboration are brilliant, Halima says: “The placement employers have been amazed to see how students with disabilities come in, keep to time, are professional, work in a team, do all the things that match up to someone with no disability.”
“Students have absolutely loved it too. They have wanted to go back and apply to the placements where they have worked or go on and do an apprenticeship there.”
Student
Tara Bhatia is a student with learning and medical needs, studying a T Level in in Digital Production, Design and Development at Ursuline High School in Balham, southwest London. She’s recently finished an industry placement with the Department for Education at Westminster and reflects on the experience.
“I’ve enjoyed the placement a lot,” Tara says. “I've enjoyed meeting new people and learning about what the organisation does. And I've also learned a lot about leadership and confidence.”
“I didn’t need to adjust the placement for my learning and medical needs at all. Everything was just fine as it was. I did a working style questionnaire at the start to show how I like to work, so they knew I would I enjoy speaking face-to-face or on a Teams call. I think that works well for me, probably because of my slow processing speed.”
Most of Tara’s time during the placement was spent on coding and learning a new software program. “I was also producing some SQL queries with someone from the team. And in the second half of the placement, I was focusing on design work and redesigning some of the pages on the website to make them more accessible by focusing on the colours they use.”
Being in a busy office environment was new and potentially challenging for Tara, so the team at the DfE organised the work carefully, split it up into manageable parts and kept in close contact with Tara and her fellow-students. “They met up with us each day to show what we were going to do for the day, and then to see how we're doing with it,” she says. “It was all very well organised, and we had lots of breaks in between.”
Tara is thinking about the next steps in her career now. She’s deciding between an apprenticeship in software engineering or as computer design degree at university.
“The T Level reinforced that I really wanted to do computer science and something in cyber security or software engineering, like a web developer. Having done this placement, I don’t feel that my learning and medical needs will affect my plans except that work would have to be close by or with easy access, to make the travel easier.”
And Tara has a positive message to other students with SEND about being on a placement.
“I would say to be confident and that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. And there's always someone around to help, so whatever your needs are they shouldn’t really be any problem.”
What employers can do and how providers can help – checklist
This downloadable checklist:
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- Lists the key areas of responsibility in hosting successful placements for a student with SEND
- Suggests what employers can do in these areas and how providers can help them
- Gives employers and providers the opportunity to discuss and agree the actions each of them will take
Use the checklist when working with the provider to:
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- Discuss the preparations needed to host a student with SEND
- Make sure that all the key areas are covered
- Agree and record actions
Sharing placement hours with the provider
Hosting a student with SEND is highly rewarding, but it helps if the student is thoroughly prepared before the placement starts.
For this reason, employers are allowed to share up to a third of the placement hours with the provider. So for example, if the total placement is the minimum of 315 hours, the student can spend up to 105 hours in the provider’s facilities getting ready for the placement.
The student must spend this time:
- In a similar environment to the placement, e.g. onsite nursery, lab, or design studio
- Learning technical and employability skills that are relevant to the placement
Helping students with SEND to learn at work
Like any other placement student, students with SEND learn by contributing to real-life tasks and projects, being properly supervised, working as part of a team, and gradually increasing their independence and responsibility as the placement goes on.
They may benefit especially from these five techniques, which line managers and mentors can easily use.
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- Demonstrate the task first and talk the student through what you’re doing, then give them explicit instructions and watch them as they carry it out, helping them when needed – the ‘show and tell’ technique
- Break the task down into smaller steps or stages, giving clear instructions for each and a single question or problem for the student to tackle one at a time – known as ‘chunking’ the task
- Provide enough support so that the student can successfully complete tasks that they couldn’t or shouldn’t do unsupervised, then gradually remove the support until they can do them independently – this technique is sometimes called ‘scaffolding’
- Put the student into a small sub-team of colleagues so they feel comfortable and not overwhelmed or distracted, and give the student a clear role in the task – this ‘flexible grouping’ technique allows you to give the student a wide range of tasks
- Use visual aids such as planners, task breakdowns, models, mind maps etc. to help the student visualise a task, separate it into stages, come up with their own ideas, and see the whole task from start to finish – a technique known as ‘visualisation’
It’s also worth knowing that students with SEND often use technology at school or college to help them learn, and this can be very helpful at work as well. For example, they may:
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- Take notes on mobile apps
- Create surveys and forms using MS Forms
- Use the Dictate function in Word rather than, or in addition to, the keyboard
- Find things out using AI such as ChatGPT or Gemini
- Communicate through WhatsApp or GoogleChat
- Use Immersive Reader to customise how Word documents appear while they read and edit them
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