Q5. How can we ensure that children in the Targeted Plus layer, are best supported?

The context: ‘Targeted Plus’ is the second of three levels of support for children with SEND. It will include access to ‘Experts at Hand’ – e.g. speech and language specialists, educational psychologists. Each child will have a digital Individual Support Plan and access to an Inclusion Base (when required) within the school for bespoke interventions and individual and small group work. Targeted Plus may also include temporary placements in alternative provision or a specialist setting to assess and address needs, before returning to mainstream.

In your answer, you may want to consider:

• More clarity is needed on who will be included as ‘Experts at Hand’. For example, might this include specialists in supporting children who have experienced trauma and disrupted attachments, therapeutic social workers, clinicians with expertise in differentiating between presentations of developmental trauma, reactive attachment disorder and autism?
• Temporary placements in alternative provision and specialist settings will not be useful for many care-experienced children if those settings do not have expertise in supporting needs arising from trauma and disrupted attachments.
• For children who have experienced significant loss, including adopted children, the emotional significance of being taken away from their school and their friends to a new setting, and then repeating this experience only a short time later, must be taken into account.