Where did it all begin...

Hi everyone, welcome to our blog 😊

We wanted to create a blog to share all that we are continuously learning about the wonderful world of special educational needs in particular Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties. It is an opportunity to share what we get up to working with these wonderful children and the work we do in promoting inclusion in the community and increasing knowledge and understanding.

So where did it all begin...

Hannah and I both started working at a small special school in Lincolnshire in September 2014. Hannah was the class teacher and I was a TA2. Hannah had moved from teaching in mainstream and I had moved from a role as an assistant SEN inclusion manager at a mainstream school. It was a baptism of fire! We had a class of 11 pupils with a range of needs including Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down’s Syndrome, Fragile X Syndrome and a range of other wonderfully complex children. Our classroom was only a little larger than our lounge! It was a tight squeeze and a vast learning experience. No two days were the same, we have lots of funny stories from our first year, typical things only SEN teachers will understand. Pootuations galore and and an unfortunate incident involving weewee wellies! (my wellies unfortunately, not my wee!) we have come a long way since then. Hannah is the lead PMLD teacher in school and has a lovely class of primary aged children with PMLD. I have moved from a TA role to teaching a great group of secondary aged pupils with PMLD/CLDD.

As a new teacher, Hannah was unsure where to look for guidance, there wasn’t much from a quick google search and it isn’t always clear which book could help. Hannah went onto the TES forum and struck up a conversation with Joanna Grace, the founder of The Sensory Projects. Jo quickly became one of Hannah’s inspirations and then mine also. Theoigh Jo, we came to hear of the extraordinaire that is Flo Longhorn.

A few months or so later, Hannah and I saw a workshop advertised in Cambridge hosted by Flo and Les Staves. We could not miss this opportunity. So the ever committed teachers that we are ventured down to Cambridge on a Saturday. We were in awe of Flo’s experience and her stories and Les’ creative ideas. Following the workshop we headed into Cambridge for a bit of shopping. Shopping trips with Hannah and I always intend on being for ourselves however, as soon as we hit Tiger and other fabulous shops they only ever become opportunities for resource shopping!

We were lucky enough to chat to Flo at the end of the workshop and express our confusion over the traditional National Curriculum we were following and of our lack of training in Lincolnshire. She offered to come to our school for free all the way from Belgium and deliver training to us. We couldn’t believe it! We exchanged contact details and went on our way very giggly and excited! Naturally, we know Flo is an extremely busy woman and never thought she could actually make it all the way from Belgium but much to our surprise Flo sent an email with some possible dates!

Read our next blog post to find out what happened when Flo Longhorn herself came to Boston!

Be sure to subscribe to our blog to keep up to date with all of our future posts. We will write about our lessons and resource ideas, review the latest books, discuss topics that are hot on social media, write about our inclusive trips out and about, the upcoming Parallel sensory 1K plus many more points of our research and interest. 

Website references:
Joanna Grace, The Sensory Projects http://jo.element42.org/
Florence Longhorn http://flopublications.com/index.php
Les Staves http://www.veryspecialmaths.co.uk/