Mary and I started #SENexchange in 2015 as we thought there was a need for a discussion around children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. Our discussions take place on Wednesday evenings between 8 and 8-30 pm during term time.
Our over-riding aim of #SENexchange has always been to share the knowledge, skills and experience that is out there in order to best support our children and young people with SEND and their families.
Over the years we have been overwhelmed and truly grateful to have received such a good following and within that a group of regular contributors to our Wednesday evening discussions who readily share their knowledge and experience.
Over the last few years we have on occasions involved other colleagues in co-hosting with us and have found this really adds value to our discussions as we are able to use the particular specialist knowledge of some of our colleagues. This includes the areas of Autistic Spectrum Condition, Speech and Language Therapy, Pathological Demand Avoidance and many more areas. More recently, we have established regular discussions co-hosted with Anne Heavey on behalf of @WholeSchoolSEND. This has brought a new and wider audience and new energy to our weekly discussions.
We would like to continue to build on how we extend our reach to the community out there working with children and young people with SEND and their families and therefore have established a small team of our regular contributors who are going to co-host with us during the start of the summer term.
From April 2019 we will be welcoming new co-hosts @Callum_SEND, @MariaRamsay2, @devschsenco, @Claire_R123 joining @anneheavey123 and we hope everyone will extend a warm welcome and lots of support to them during the coming months.
We have also added a topic request form to our Twitter profile page to allow our contributors to make suggestions to keep discussions relevant to today’s cohort of children with SEND.
We look forward to our continued collaboration and ‘exchange’ of knowledge and expertise as the academic year continues.
