Adapting English lessons for students with SEND

The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report Special educational needs in mainstream schools was published in 2020, and in October 2026 the EEF still lists it as the first edition. Its third recommendation is “Ensure all pupils have access to high quality teaching”, and it names five strategies for that teaching: explicit instruction, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, scaffolding, flexible grouping and technology. Its starting point is one English departments can work with: “To a great extent, good teaching for pupils with SEND is good teaching for all.”

Explicit instruction

The report describes explicit instruction as “a range of teacher-led approaches focused on teacher demonstration followed by guided practice and independent practice”. In an English lesson, that is the order of the work. The teacher explodes one quotation, thinking aloud about the method, the word worth zooming in on, the effect and the writer’s purpose. The class then builds a paragraph together before anyone writes alone.

For students with SEND, keep the thinking aloud short and specific, write the four notes where everyone can see them, and leave them on the board while students write.

Scaffolds that fade

The EEF says: “The teacher will gradually remove the support (the scaffold) as the pupil becomes able to complete the task independently.” In our schemes, the three levels of support are those stages. Everyone answers the same question about the same extract.

• Securing (aiming for a 4): a word bank with short definitions, a choice of quotations, a worked example on a different quotation, and What, How and Why sentence starters.
• Strengthening (aiming for grades 5 to 6): prompts for each part of the paragraph, a paragraph planner and a checklist.
• Soaring (aiming for grades 7 to 9): a debatable statement to argue with, prompts towards other readings and precise analytical verbs, with no sentence starters.

A need recorded on the SEND register does not decide the level. A student with dyslexia may have the sharpest reading of Scrooge in the room and need the word bank only for spelling. The hinge question decides where each student starts, and students move up as soon as the frame is doing work they can do themselves. Over a unit, the aim is fewer starters and more of the student’s own sentences.

Cognitive and metacognitive strategies

Cognitive strategies are the routines of the subject: how to read a poem for the first time, how to plan an answer in five minutes, how to build a What–How–Why paragraph. Metacognitive strategies are the student checking and steering their own work. In English that means a short checklist read before writing and again after it, and a closing question that asks students what they would do differently next time. Teach the routine explicitly, practise it on easy material, then use it on hard material.

Flexible grouping

The EEF suggests that teachers “allocate pupils to groups flexibly based on the individual needs that they currently share with other pupils”, and break the groups up when the job is done. After a hinge question, pull together the four or five students who chose the same wrong answer, re-teach that one point for ten minutes, and send them back. Next lesson the group may be different.

Technology

For reading, a recording of the text with the book open helps a student keep up with the story; our guide to audiobooks, film and stage versions lists free and legal ones. For writing, a laptop may be the student’s normal way of working. If a student will use a word processor or a computer reader in the exam, they need to use it in lessons and mocks first: see Access arrangements in English exams.

Reading support

The EEF’s secondary literacy guidance warns: “Unless interventions are well-matched to underlying difficulties, they are unlikely to be effective.” A student who cannot decode, a student who reads accurately but slowly, and a student who reads fluently but does not know the words need different help, and the SENCo’s assessment can say which.

In class, three habits are worth building. Teach three to five words before the reading, with definitions a 14-year-old understands, and bring them back in the next Do Now. Read the extract aloud while students follow, so that decoding does not stand between them and the meaning. And give the whole story early, so that each extract lands in a plot the student already knows: our article Do students need to read the whole text? sets out why.

Working with the SENCo

The EEF’s second recommendation is to “Build an ongoing, holistic understanding of your pupils and their needs”, and its fifth is to “Work effectively with teaching assistants”. In practice:

• Read the student’s profile before the first lesson of the year, and ask the SENCo what has worked in other subjects.
• Send the SENCo evidence, as well as concerns: a timed paragraph, a reading the student could not finish, the support that made the difference.
• Brief the teaching assistant before the lesson on the hinge question and the level each student is starting on, so their help adds to your teaching.
• Raise anything that might need an exam arrangement in Year 10, while there is time to build the evidence.

Sources

• Education Endowment Foundation, Special educational needs in mainstream schools (2020), and the full guidance report
• Education Endowment Foundation, Improving literacy in secondary schools (July 2018)