Achieving the NPA Stamp of Approval Scheme

Setting Practitioners who have successfully completed a Portage Workshop – A small steps approach to learning for children with SEND:

Setting Practitioners who holds and maintains professional membership of the National Portage Association throughout the period of accreditation:

Name of Setting: ......

Date started: ......

NB Your setting will need to be rated as ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ at your last OFSTED inspection.

The Portage Principles

How is your setting

Embracing these

Principles?

Your Setting’s Aims and Principles

How does your setting’s aims reflect the Portage Aims below? / Evidence
Comment on or attach your setting’s aims
1. Working with families to help then participate and be included in their community
2. Minimising disability barriers
3. Supporting local inclusive services for children
How does your setting’s principles reflect the Portage Model? / Evidence
Comment on or attach your setting’s principles
Child-Led Play
Responding to child-led play
Generalising newly acquired skills
Discussing play with parents
Recording significant play observations
Family Focus
Sharing daily/weekly experiences
Addressing needs and looking forward
Sharing information
Empowering parents
Promoting Inclusion
Structured Teaching
Joint planning and practise of a teaching target
Deciding what to do next together
Reviewing activities and their success
How do you work in partnership?
Comment below:

Using Clear Language

Our setting uses clear language when describing children’s behaviours and when planning their next steps by including:
Who
Does what
Under what conditions
To what degree of success / Evidence – Please attach 4 individual learning and development plans with the ID blacked out.

Planning for Success

We establish a holistic profile for each child with SEND by considering all these aspects:
· The family
· People who help the child and what they are doing
· Observation of the child’s play / Evidence – comment on the assessments, both formal and informal that you use to identify BASELINE SKILLS and EMERGING SKILLS. Use the boxes below to list the formal/informal records.
Planning for Success cont
Together with parents, we agree Long Term Goals for each child with SEND using the EYFS Outcomes / Evidence (profiles, checklists, ILDPs, spider diagrams etc)
This ensures that:
· We build upon a skill that the child is beginning to show some progress in
· Goals are functional for the child in the home and setting
· Goals are relevant and meaningful and support the child’s inclusion
· Goals are enabling the child to become more independent / Comments:

A Small Steps Approach

We are able to identify the small steps involved in individual play activities or self-care tasks / Evidence – Choose a play activity and a self-care task and write down the small steps or ‘component skills’ involved
Play Activity:
Self-Care Task:
We are able to implement a number of strategies to make an action easier for a child e.g.
Backward Chaining
Forward Chaining
Easiest to hardest / Evidence – Write a brief description of a real situation when you have helped a child using one of these strategies
We know how to change the ‘conditions’ to make activities easier for children with SEND
· Prompts
· Limit the choice
· Exaggerating difference
· Grading toys / differentiation
· Modelling and demonstration
· Language levels
· Context – who, where and when / Evidence – comment on or describe how you have supported children’s learning by using these strategies. Provide photos if that helps.

Examples of planning, recording and sharing

We use Open Ended Activity Plans when we want to encourage a child to:
· Generalise newly learned skills
· To find out more about the child
· Highlight the pattern of play behaviours and level of play
· Focus on creative play and imagination / Evidence – Please attach 4 of you open ended activity plans with the child(rens’) ID blackened out
We use ILDPs or Outcome Focussed Activity Plans when we want to encourage the child to:
· Keep an activity consistent whoever does it
· Offer opportunities for repetition
· Concentrate on reducing prompts
· Record detailed progression / Evidence – Please attach 4 examples of your ILDPs, these can be the same or different plans used to evidence the Using Clear Language section.

Play

We have a multisensory ‘wow’ bag to help engage children with adult led play / Evidence – please attach a photo of your ‘Wow’ bag and its contents
We specifically assess the play development of each child with SEND
using the
Sharing Play with Others model
Solitary -> Parallel -> Associative -> Co-operative
We are able to identify what sort of play each child enjoys e.g.
Sensorimotor
Cause and effect
Relational / construction
Physical play
Pretend play
Creative play
Imaginative / role play
We also work towards ‘generalising’ young children’s play
Acquisition-learning new skills
Fluency-practising new skills
Generalisation- using new skills in a variety contexts
Adaptation – identifying for themselves, situations for using new skills / Evidence – Describe how you have assessed a child’s play skills and then supported the development of their play.

Working Towards Achieving the National Portage Association Stamp of Approval