Flexible Learning Plans | How to improve your learner journey
With Ofsted focused on the inspection of SEND standards and the introduction of the new ESFA guidance around Learning Support Funding (LSF), there is one clear message from the Government:
Ensuring quality in your learner journey is everything.
Quality in your processes. Quality in your delivery. And most importantly, equal access to quality education for all learners.
Learning Support Funding is there to help providers deliver on this promise, ensuring there are robust and proactive processes and adjustments in place for learners that require support.
Learner support must be aligned to initial assessment. The ESFA has made it a requirement that assessment of learning difficulties and disabilities must be part of a learner’s initial assessment.
Among other changes, the ESFA has made it clear that providers can determine which assessment tools they use.
Unsupported needs can have a direct impact on a learner’s ability to complete their programme, and therefore providers must take steps to ensure learners are not disadvantaged early on and keep this effort up throughout the learner journey.
Cognassist’s cognitive assessment and support platform enables providers to identify and support learning needs through gold-standard psychometrics and evidence-based tools.
We have worked with our clients in education to develop new functionality that improves their delivery of quality learner support.
Flexible Learning Plans
Cognassist’s Flexible Learning Plans enable tutors and SEND coordinators to customise a learner’s support plan.
Once initial assessment is complete, learners who require support can access a range of monthly support strategies and adjustments tailored to their identified needs and programme level.
Tutors can choose modules that are more relevant for their learners and assign them at a time that suits them. For example, queuing modules on study, revision and dealing with stress closer to exam time.
This feature also allows staff to react to learners’ challenges within their learning journey, switching out modules before the beginning of each month. Clients can curate these monthly learning strategies around a learner’s curriculum, current challenges and pace of learning.
Our filter functionality allows people to search our entire support library based on different categories and skills, including communication, mental health, time management and many other areas.
Alongside our reasonable adjustment recommendations, our platform allows you to plan the whole support programme in advance or during your monthly review sessions with your learner.
Flexible Learning Plans are optional. Learners will still automatically receive a range of tailored support modules every month through our platform.
Maintaining flexibility in your learner journey
Education has changed from ‘one size fits all’ to ‘personalised starting points and delivery’.
Initial assessment of learning needs is critical to ensure your learners get the most out of their education and achieve the best outcomes. If you’re not assessing all learners, you may find it harder to engage learners further down the line and risk higher levels of dropout.
“Early initial assessment had a positive impact on the take-up of learning support, a key factor in improving success rates. Where data were available, apprentices who received learning support as a result of initial assessment did as well as, or better than, those who did not require it.” (Ofsted, 2010)
We must do everything we can to identify barriers to learning and eliminate them in education. And a big part of this will be supporting staff with the training and tools they need to support learners effectively at scale, without increasing the pressure and workload on tutors.
“With such a complex combination, maintaining a balance between equity, delivering a fair and excellent education to all, and catering to individual learning needs has made a teacher’s job extremely challenging (Lamport, Graves & Ward, 2012). Teachers need supportive policies and frameworks to provide quality learning experiences to all students and build on their diverse strengths.” (OECD, 2017)
Our Flexible Learning Plans aim to provide a responsive framework for learning support and enable adaptive measures that work for tutors and learners alike.
To truly deliver on achievement targets and raise standards within the sector, we need to give organisations an advantage, support staff to accurately identify learning needs and help level the playing field for all learners.
If you’re curious about guidance around initial assessment, your duty under the Equality Act 2010 and best practices, read our free handbook on How to understand and safeguard your learners’ needs from day one.
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