Engaging students with additional support needs Guidance

Background

This guidance is part of a suite of materials aimed at college staff and its students’ association on improving the engagement of students with additional support needs in the quality of their learning and teaching.

sparqs was approached by several colleges to explore how we could provide resources and materials to support them engage students with additional support needs more widely. While this group of students is very well engaged in the classroom due to the nature of the teaching and resources used, college wide processes may, unintentionally, create barriers to their involvement in mainstream processes.

Students with additional support needs may face a range of barriers to involvement in college processes. These can be physical, procedural and attitudinal and may include:

  • Transport – students with multiple impairments may rely on community transport – minibuses or taxis – organised and paid for by the local authority. These will be at fixed times and will restrict the students involvement in the college to set times.
  • Support – often they will rely on personal or social care support, again, provided by or funded by the local authority. This will be limited and will restrict involvement.
  • Finance – funding is also likely to be fixed and limited to education time.
  • Awareness/knowledge – inaccessible information and communication could mean the student doesn’t know they could be involved, or how to be involved.
  • ‘Tolerance’ – Attitudes from other students or staff could mean any involvement is minimal or tokenistic because of the assumption the student won’t understand.
  • Being under valued – the views of people with learning difficulties are often undervalued because of the above awareness and tolerance reasons.
  • Rigidity of structures – timings of meetings, format of papers or minutes, definitions of which students can be involved and how, can all be rigidly proceduralised, making supported involvement and flexible involvement difficult.

Purpose of the guidance

The issues above are very broad and some of them are beyond the control of the college. The guidance aims to give suggestions for situations that the college can influence and change.

Who this guidance is aimed at

This guidance will be useful for anyone working with students with additional support needs including staff supporting student engagement, staff in liaison or engagement positions and student association officers.

Additional support needs (ASN) is a very broad term that potentially could cover a wide range of students. In this guidance it is used to refer to students with educational additional support needsarising from multiple and complex impairments that are educated separately in supported education.

  1. Communication

The importance of ensuring that all modes of information provision are accessible to students in supported education cannot be under-estimated.

The Scottish Accessible Information Forum (SAIF) produces a range of resources on improving access to information, all available on its website a

2.1. Accessible documents

There is a lot of guidance available from SAIF and impairment specific organisations about making documents accessible but some general principles are:

  • Use a sans serif font like Ariel or Verdana;
  • Font size should be larger, preferably at least 14 pt;
  • Keep text aligned left with a ragged right edge;
  • Bullet points should end in punctuation (. ; :)
  • Keep bold use for highlighting important information, and use of italics,underlining and capitals to a minimum;
  • Colour code sections, alongside text;
  • Keep a lot of white space, use wide line spacing;
  • Use images that support the text.

Documents can be transcribed into a range of different formats such as tape, large print, electronic versions, Braille and Easy Read.

2.2. Accessible presentations

Powerpoint presentations can present barriers through both content and delivery. It’s important to ensure the message you are trying to convey can be easily understood, the slides which convey the information are accessible and that the delivery of the information is open. Ideally, formal presentations should be kept to a minimum in meetings but if they are necessary, similar guidelines to accessible documents apply.

The guidance for the style of the slides is similar to those for accessible documents but also includes:

  • Font should be minimum 24 point and variations in size of font should have a purpose (i.e. for titles and headings);
  • Keep a lot of white space, use wide line spacing;
  • Keep transitioning to a minimum;
  • Try to only have 7 pieces of information per slide;

How you deliver the information can also impact on how someone understands it.

  • Read all slides as part of the presentation and explain any charts or graphs;
  • Face your audience when speaking;
  • Use microphones when available as these might link to an induction loop;
  • If using audio content or visuals/animation wait don’t speak over the top of them.
  1. Training

Classes in supported education will elect or choose a course rep and that person can access rep training in two ways.

2.1. Attending standard CRT

The sparqs Introductory Course Rep Training is available to all colleges, either to deliver themselves or to be delivered by a sparqs Associate Trainer. sparqs Associate Trainers receive training on how to train a diverse group of students. Students with additional support needs do attend the training but some might find the language and concepts difficult to understand. Should they attend the standard training, the college should:

  • Provide some pre- and post-training support to enable the student to get the best learning experience possible; and
  • Provide teaching assistance during the training similar to that provided during class time to support the student on a more individual basis.

2.2. Attending training designed for their needs

In response to requests from colleges, sparqs has developed Course Rep Training designed specifically for the meet the needs of students with additional support needs. Designed to be delivered either by the college or by sparqs with support fromcollege staff, all materials are available on the sparqs website at

2.3. Support for the whole class

It will benefit the whole class to have an understanding of what their course rep will do and why. This helps the class to understand why they are electing a peer as a course rep and what their relationship with the course rep is. It is useful to give the whole class some training or information on representation. Some classes have chosen to deliver some form of course rep training to the whole class to support this.

  1. Involvement in meetings

Students attending meetings might find them difficult due to a range of factors, such as how information about the meetings is conveyed to them, feeling intimidated by a large group of people and not wanting to speak up, or not understanding the content of the meeting.

3.1. Access

Meetings should be held in rooms and venues that are accessible. Take into account:

  • physical access such as lifts and ramps;
  • door widths;
  • accessible toilets;
  • disabled parking;
  • distance between the meeting room and toilets, parking, etc;
  • lighting;
  • external noise.

3.2. Dates and times

Students will only be in the college for fixed amounts of time and will often have support packages or transport provision that might not be flexible enough to enable them to come in at other times. Try to have meetings on days that students are able to attend.

Dates of meetings should be set as early as possible, preferably a month in advance to give time to co-ordinate any support needed for the meeting and for the student to have time to prepare.

3.3. Length of meetings

Try to keep meetings as short as possible, but if they must be longer, include a comfort break every hour.

3.4. Papers

As far as possible, meeting agendas and papers should be as straightforward as possible. This isn’t always possible and meetings might be accompanied by a lot of paperwork. It might help to colour code each item on the agenda, or give each item a separate ‘cover sheet’ to demarcate items.

Send out papers well in advance of the meeting to allow time for students to go through them, with support if necessary. At least 2 weeks is preferable. Language used in papers should be Plain English. Papers should be transcribed into an appropriate format for the student, including Easy Read format, if necessary.

3.5. During the meeting

Allow extra time during the meeting to clarify any difficult points or issues, or to allow the student to talk to their supporter.

Try to stick to the agenda. Changing the order as you go along can be confusing.

3.6. Support

Students may need additional support to participate in meetings, either before the meeting to prepare and plan for it and to understand what will happen, during the meeting to understand the process, or after to make sense of what was discussed. It is useful to discuss this with the student and agree what the college or students’ association can provide.

3.7. Use of language

Try not to presume that everyone has prior knowledge of a subject, and check understanding as the meeting progresses.

Try not to use jargon or abbreviations.

  1. Consultation with students

4.1. Preparation time

Try to give as much notice of any student consultation as possible, preferably weeks. Let the students know in advance what you will be talking about and asking them to give them time to think about their views and how they want to express them.

4.2. Different methods

Try to incorporate different methods into the consultation such as one to one interviews, group interviews and focus groups. Ask students how they would prefer to be consulted.

4.3. Support

As with all other areas mentioned in this guidance, provide adequate support to students to enable them to understand what is being asked of them and to communicate this. This should be done in discussion with the student.

  1. Ongoing support

All of the above guidance focuses on specific issues or times. To enable a student to fully participate in representation and quality processes, additional ongoing support might be needed.

5.1.Buddying and mentoring schemes

Providing some king of peer support through a buddying or mentoring scheme is one way of enabling the student to participate in meetings. The buddy can provide pre-meeting support to go through the previous meeting’s papers to ensure understanding of what happened. They could also help frame the views the student needs to express and help them practice what they might say during the meeting. After the meeting, they could support the student to talk to the class about what has happened.

It’s important that the buddy is impartial. Their role is to provide support and enable the student to represent the views of the class.

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Engaging students with additional support needs: Guidancesparqs 2012