Do SENCO's get trained on ADHD?

[ADHDDDDDDDBOOM]

Because it sure as fuck feels like ours hasn't.

Does anyone know?

No, and every meeting I have with my sons teacher and senco they always mention his lack of concentration. Lol okay 👍🏻

Nope. And a lot of Sencos just deflect back on staff because they have no idea.

This makes a lot of sense as we are having similar issues. I thought they would be clued up on all sen conditions!!

The SENCO award is a huge amount of extra work when you are teaching full time, but I agree with others a lot of it is based around the job role rather than SEN conditions themselves. The job role isn't to be an expert on conditions sadly, it's co-ordination support and seeking support from other (hopefully trained) professionals. Primaries haemorrhage SENCOs because it's a thankless job. It generally pays less than £50 a month extra often for hours and hours of extra work. I hold the qualification and turned it down in my new school because it's not in any way worth it.

Shockingly they don't have to be trained in anything to do with special needs and disability. I had to educate my sons primary senco on ASD and adhd

Unfortunately op many Senco do it's to get extra money but don't have interest in sen.
A little bit of research, a basic level 2 course would go a long way.
Even reading some some sen stuff on here would go an extremely long way.

I would expect any Senco to have at least one some basic level 2 training on broad sen and to have initial ideas of how to support dc with sen.
Is that too much to ask.
I would then expect Senco to have tips and ideas of how to support sen and be able and open to do mote research or get help for anything speficic in the school.
It's the basics and it's what I would do.

This needs to be made so much more transparent.
We are the blind leading the blind in schools on sen.

Parents need to be all over it. Unfortunately.... Dc with sent whole don't have parents who can or will DIY it....

They do get a bit of extra money

I’m not paid a penny extra for being a senco-even with the L7 qualification, which wasn’t an ‘online’ course!!

I have been a teacher for almost 20 years, teach a wide range of children with SEN and have two children myself with EHCPs.

You could not pay me enough to be a SENCO- ever. Lack of funding, time, training, trying to manage a team of poorly paid staff, trying to gain sufficient support for children with complex needs. Parents are understandably upset at lack of resources and support.

It's mainly Co ordinating and allocation of provision with chronicly under funded budgets.

The thing is, our knowledge and understanding of ADHD is so different now to what it was even 10 years ago. It's covers such a broad spectrum of differences and difficulties, and attitudes have changed hugely. Even if someone was trained in issues around ADHD some years ago, they'd need to do a lot of work to keep their knowledge updated .
And whilst you'd expect regular CPDI, I suspect that the demands on SENDCOs means that ongoing training may well low on the list of priorities.
I would expect a SRNDCO to have a working knowledge of available resources etc.
You clearly think your child is being failed, and it's such a struggle when you can't access the right support. Can you raise this with anyone else in the school? Head or governors?

The real issue is the education system barely serves the needs of neurotypical students. With a focus on sitting still memory retention exams and regurgitation of facts. We need to rip up Gove curriculum and start with prope evidence based learning and a curriculum that meets the needs of a neuro diverse work force.

Jeez, so many typos- sorry fat fingering on phone!

If legislation is put in for SENCOs to have a specific condition training, then all other groups will be pushing for their condition to have training too, so they'll end up doing more and more time training (and some of the training will go fairly quickly out of date as we learn more about it) and less time actually on the job.

I know with my dc they know far more about the one with ASD/ADHD than the other one who has a less common disability. However over 60 children a year are born with some form of this disability, and it is one that can also be acquired, so more by school age. I've had phone calls with the GP where they were asking me for advice (for another child that had just been born) rather than the other way round. However I have heard parents complaining that the school hasn't had training for their dc with the same condition.
The condition my other dc has is fairly consistent across children, and advice hasn't really changed in the last 20 years, whereas ADHD is much more individual and is changing quite a bit.

If legislation is put in place for sencos to ‘have’ to do specific training, then I hope legislation is also put in place for us to be given some sort of release time or funding in order for it to happen. The last two courses I did, I did in my own time and paid for myself.

I don’t know if people realise how bad things are in school.

This thread is eye opening.

I am not in the UK but looking to do some 'online training' for my own personal professional development, rather than it being mandatory.

The UK education system, despite being one of the most child centered in Europe, is being run into the ground, from what I can gather from friends and family in the UK.

My son's old mainstream sendco was fantastic. She listened, read around and did training in her own time around my son's issues (mainly PDA, which she had heard of but didn't know a lot about prior to meeting my son). She spent time training and supporting the staff around him. However, it was the staff arund him that mattered to his daily school life, and sadly some of them just would not accept the approaches needed and we're downright obstructive. The sendco was caught in the middle. So even when you have a brilliant sendco, the wider staff can still let down children who they supposedly support. And having a good sendco is by no means a given. I'm so glad my son is now in a specialist provision. We got it just in time as our LA now has a policy of keeping kids in mainstream at all costs.

That's good news for your ds

Also the pay is so dire for the support staff which doesn't help but shame they didn't implement the strategies suggested

Why do you think that was?

SENCo should be its own standalone role within a school. Most SENCos are also teaching staff with the full load of that role as well as all of the load of the SENCo role, it is very difficult to do both to the best of their ability simply because there aren't enough hours in the day. Making SENCo its own, separate role would mean the person filling it can concentrate solely on SEND provision within school.

Can we please put this misinformation to bed once and for all before it dominates the thread?

It is a statutory requirement that SENCos complete a Master's level qualification in supporting special needs and disabilities.

There are of course good SENCos and bad SENCos out there - a good SENCo is worth their weight in gold and you never forget an encounter with a bad one, however they will have both been qualified to Masters level.

I think the challenge with ND is thehuge diversity of need and experience- if you've known one child with say, adhd, you've known one child. The next one could have very different needs, coping strategies, home life etc.

Training providers will also likely focus on the special school sector where the intervention needs are more extreme and the fact that all pupils have echps means its more likely there'll be money specifically for this.

I know our school spends some pupil premium money on specialist training for adhd and asd but that reflects the needs of the pupil premium kids at our school.

Schools do not get given enough money for this stuff.

In our case there was one particular TA who had been working at the school for a long time. She had a very set idea on how children should behave and was very strict. She felt that a lot of strategies were simply 'pandering' to a 'naughty' child. So as an example she would shout at him and berate him when he was heightened, despite being trained about de-escalating before having a calm conversation about behaviour. I honestly felt on occasion she was actively goading him. The sendco was very frustrated but ultimately she'd been there a long time and they didn't have many staff available to work with him. He did eventually work with different TAs who were amazing with him but ultimately a mainstream school did not have the staff and resources to meet his needs. I will be forever grateful for the overall support from that school though and they were instrumental in helping to get the placement he needed.

This: the SENCO is everyone's whipping boy.

I think it is important to differentiate between training in ‘being a SENCo’ (statutory) and ‘training in every type of SEN that might exist in a school’ (obviously not possible).

The theory is that SENCos co-ordinate internal support (and paperwork) based on input from a range of external experts - health professionals, paediatricians, specialist teachers, Early Help, Ed Psychs, OTs etc etc. The reality is that all of those sources of expertise have been decimated, so the SENCo’s thankless task is to try to cobble something together based on their own research and experience l, that can be delivered in school by far too few poorly paid support staff and massively overloaded teachers.

As a primary class teacher, it’s normal to have about a quarter of children with some kind of SEN, all different. Imagine a SENCo trying to be an expert on every single one over the entire school?

Just going to point out there's obviously a massive difference between primary and secondary.

Our SENDCO and deputy-SENDCO don't teach at all, but manage a team of 30+ TAs and a big Inclusion department. They have run whole-staff training for the teachers on ADHD. I don't know their qualifications- but, jeez, they definitely know their stuff.

That would have been the case at any of the secondaries where I've worked.

They've even tried to put support in place for the kids who probably have ADHD but won't be able to get a diagnosis because of the 3-year waiting list.