Page 87 - SEN116 January-February 2022

Recruitment
Recruitment in special
educational needs
Elizabeth Holmes advocates a school SEND recruitment strategy which takes applicants from a wide variety of backgrounds, to find those hidden gems.
Running a successful special educational needs school, or department in a mainstream school, requires a team with many skills and great depth of knowledge in order to support children and young
people effectively. In order to ensure that your staff team has the skills and knowledge required, the recruitment process will need to draw on as wide a pool of potential candidates as possible. While those from a traditional route of initial teacher education may be suitable for your needs, other professions such as psychology, and even accountancy, law and medicine may also produce candidates with just the skills and knowledge that your setting requires.
Emma Hawkins, Director of Education at Jigsaw Trust, recruits psychology graduates and would happily take more. “We tend to attract them because of their interest in behaviour. Psychology graduates learn about different approaches to learning as part of their degree and we are able to provide them with the opportunity to apply this within a SEN setting.”
“To draw on as wide a pool of potential candidates as possible”
The experience that psychology graduates typically have from their degree studies can lead to an interest in approaches to learning for children with SEND and the research surrounding this. As Hawkins has found, “I would happily take more psychology graduates as they learn about different approaches to learning and like to turn that theory into practice in a SEND setting. We also explore a lot of data when supporting different behaviours and we write up and share research so that we continually add to our knowledge base.”
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