Help with understanding why DC added to SEN register?

[morningcuppatea]

Sorry in advance this may be long! I'm just hoping to get some other perspective and thoughts after I was given a letter last week saying 'your child has now been added to our SEN register'

DS is nearly 4yo he attends preschool at a small school and has been going since he was 2, so he's been there for 2 years in January.

DS was quite delayed with s&l so last year I spoke with his teacher and we started to put into place for him to have his hearing tested and a referral to speech and language. He had a hearing test earlier this year which showed he had glue ear and we were supposed to go back for a follow up but covid has delayed everything. Which is the same with s&l, we have only very recently spoken to a therapist, however we have had other support.

Over lockdown something just clicked for DS and the progress with his speech has been amazing imo. We also potty trained over lockdown and generally everything seemed good with him, he's so interested in learning and chatting away. He has now been back at school 4 weeks, the first 2 weeks i was getting good feedback about him.

Then 2 weeks ago there was a combination of things going on in our lives and I noticed a change in his behaviour at home, the teacher mentioned this in passing to me and said something about putting a behaviour plan in place if it carried on.

So when I picked DS up from school on Friday I was given an envelope, had a quick chat with teacher asked how DS had been this week etc, was told he'd been better. When I got home I opened the envelope up to see a letter saying your dc has been added to our SEN register. It seems a bit of a shock and a leap from where we were at. I will obviously be discussing it with the teacher to try and help me understand.

I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience or opinions on this and ideas about what I should discuss with the school. I gather it's mostly to do with DS not being able to control his emotions however there are pages with targets and info but they all seem more focussed on speech and language. The targets are things which he can already do with maybe the exception being taking turns, he does sometimes take turns when I'm playing with him but I'm not sure that I would expect any 4yo to want to consistently take turns.

Thank you if you've read this far, I know there's no real answer until I speak to the school but it's playing on my mind and would be nice just to talk to someone about it.

To me, it sounds very positive that the preschool is taking such a proactive approach, many would not care. While your DS probably does really well in many areas they have identified a few areas where he is struggling with and they want to be able to help/support him as best they can. By having him in their radar they should hopefully be able to put strategies in place (and probably offer recommendations for home too) so that he has all the support that he needs to be able to overcome these struggles. Remember that the SEN is not just for children with special needs, and they usually have access to professionals like child psychologist that they can bring in to observe and make recommendations which can be really helpful when addressing behavioural issues.

Thank you @AladdinMum it's good to get another point of view. I think I've taken it all a bit personally after we had worked so hard and DS has come so far then we had a bad week and it felt like we were back to square one.