Early years provision for children with Special Educational Needs within Wandsworth

Wandsworth Council funds over 180 Early Years Settings. This funding is all provided from within the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) though a different mechanism is used to allocate to non-maintained providers of Free Nursery Education Places.  These settings include maintained nursery schools and classes and non maintained independent, private and voluntary, classes, day nurseries, nursery schools and pre-school playgroups.  In addition Wandsworth Council directly manages a specialist Children's Centre for children with learning difficulties and disabilities.  

• All settings educate children with special educational needs. If a setting receives Free Nursery Education Place (DSG) funding then the law says that a child cannot be refused a place just because they have special educational needs.
• All settings maintained by Wandsworth Council or supported Free Nursery Education Place (DSG) funding must have a Special Educational Needs Policy.
• All non-maintained settings have a special educational needs co-ordinator (Setting SENCO).
• As well as having a SENCO all settings can ask for help and advice from external professionals on Special Educational Needs issues. Usually this advice is provided by Wandsworth's Early Years Service. 
• All settings undertake observation, assessment, record keeping and monitoring of children's progress, whether a child has special educational needs or not. 
• All settings should be sensitive when it comes to recognising whether a child has special educational needs or not.
• If staff believe that a child may have special educational needs then they must discuss this with the child's parents.  If there is agreement from parents that the child has special needs and that the setting needs to make some adjustments to support the child this involves moving the child to Early Years Action on the setting's SEN Register.  This can only be done with parental consent.
• All settings should be able to offer programmes for individual children with SEN that are additional to or different from those usually offered to the other children in the setting from within their existing resources and staffing. This is called Early Years Action and may involve starting an individual plan for that child. The purpose of these plans is to meet the individual child's special educational needs.
• Parents should be involved in developing the plans for their child. These plans are called Individual Education Plans (IEP). Wandsworth's Early Years Service can help settings with this work.
• Parents should be involved in review meetings to discuss the success of the Individual Education Plan for their child. The review will decide what might happen next if the Plan has not helped the child to make adequate progress. The child might then need to be moved to Early Years Action Plus. This means that the staff will be able to refer the child to or call upon the advice of professionals who are external to the setting. These professionals might include for instance a Local Authority educational psychologist or a health service professional. If parents and the setting feel there may be a need for more than one additional service to support the child they may consider completing a Common Assessment Framework for that child with the family.
• Some children with quite significant SEN may need additional support from Wandsworth's Early Years Centre. This is a multi-disciplinary centre where the Council's Children's Services Department combine with Health Service professionals and voluntary organisations to work with and better understand children and to support their parents.
• A few children below school-age will need to have a statutory assessment of their special educational needs. A decision to request that this takes place will involve parents and will look carefully at the progress that the child has made with IEPs and Early Years Action and Early Years Action Plus.
• If a child has been identified as having special educational needs it is important to take extra care in planning how the child might best move on to primary school.

Contact numbers

• The Early Years Centre: 020 8946 0900
• Wandsworth Children's Information Service: 020 8871 7899
• Wandsworth Early Years Service: 020 8871 8789
• The Special Needs Assessment Section: 020 8871 8061 (for children undergoing statutory assessments or with statements)

More information on Early years and childcare