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Along with being a primary school teacher and leader, blogging is where this all started for Aidan. If it wasn't for his passion for writing and sharing his learning and experiences, he wouldn't be working as an education consultant with schools across the country today. Shared best practice should be available to all and here on the Aidan Severs Consulting blog you can get ideas for making a difference in your own school. The blog is also a great place to learn exactly the kind of work that Aidan can partner with your school on.
Designing A Curriculum For Belonging And Inclusion
Recently I had the pleasure of talking with Phil Banks and Danielle Lewis-Egonu for an episode of their The Kitchen Table Podcast. We talked all about designing curriculum intentionally so that all children benefit. Here's a few snippets of the episode to whet your whistle: So much of this work is about adopting a can-do mindset, and not settling for less: But this work has to be done with teacher wellbeing in mind as well as what's best for the children: "If you can work out
Aidan Severs
Apr 272 min read
Meeting The Needs Of All Pupils Using Continuous Provision in KS2
Can Early Years-inspired practice help us meet the needs of all pupils in later phases? TLDR: Yes. Implementing a version of Continuous Provision in Key Stages 1 and 2 (and who knows? perhaps beyond) can help us to teach inclusively , ensuring that the needs of all are met: those working at greater depth , students broadly in line with average, children with significant learning gaps, those with a SEN or D , pupils who are working at GD AND have a SEN - EVERYONE. Over on Li
Aidan Severs
Mar 262 min read
Rethinking Differentiation: The Mixing Desk Model for Responsive, Inclusive Teaching
The Challenge of Meeting Every Child’s Needs You know that the children in your class(es) have needs which are many and varied. You want to meet those needs. But meeting all the different needs is difficult, time-consuming and draining. But it's got to be done. Why ‘What Works for Pupils with SEND Works for All’ Isn’t the Whole Story You've heard that "what works for pupils with SEND works for all pupils" but can't shake that nagging feeling that it's not that simple. Becaus
Aidan Severs
Nov 4, 20255 min read
The Challenge of Challenge: Defining What It Means in Your School
I recently started off a teacher training session with the following questions: What do we mean by challenge? Who should we be challenging? How often should we challenge them? I'd asked roughly the same questions of senior leaders earlier in the day and it led to some interesting discussions. We realised that there was a chance that when talking about challenge we could be talking at cross-purposes. When I asked the leaders the questions, I was trying to clarify the purpose o
Aidan Severs
Oct 20, 20253 min read
From SEND To Greater Depth: Taking Everyone On The Journey (And Getting Them All To The Destination)
Imagine your next unit of work as a journey into a city centre. In this post I'll use a journey into the centre of London because it was when working with a school there that I started to use this analogy. You want all your pupils to experience a visit to Buckingham Palace, so you plan a route on the tube. You plan the best route - its economical, its efficient, and, after checking the tube map for stops with wheelchair access, its accessible to all pupils. But you know there
Aidan Severs
Dec 10, 20245 min read
Backwards Planning: What I Got Wrong
Here's the resource that this blog post refers to - you can download it for free below: In the old iteration of the above planning framework, I had the following prompts in the very last step (step 5): Who are the children who will need extra learning steps prior to the ones outlined above? Who are the children who will need extra learning steps following the ones outlined above (NSFD)? In all my recent work around providing for pupils with SEND I have realised how mistaken I
Aidan Severs
Feb 20, 20242 min read
A SEND-First Approach... To Everything
Imagine a world where children with SEND really were the priority. What would that look like and what would the impact be on all children? That which we've explored in a couple of previous blog posts, Margaret Mullholland puts succinctly in a TES article: "...there’s now a feeling that schools should be structured for these pupils in the first place, rather than trying to adapt to their needs retrospectively." I read the above article whilst working on a SEND project for Oak
Aidan Severs
Feb 6, 20243 min read
Whole Class Reading: Meeting The Needs of Lower Attainers
Perhaps the biggest worry for teachers when considering the switch from the guided reading carousel to whole class reading is how children of different 'abilities' will manage in the lessons. There are, however, various strategies a teacher can employ to support learners with different needs. You'll have noticed that above I enclosed the word abilities with inverted commas. The first strategy is for a teacher to alter their way of thinking about ability. One possible problem
Aidan Severs
Nov 12, 20216 min read
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