The Cognition & Learning Service is part of the Specialist Education Service

It includes the Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) Service, formerly known as the Dyslexia Outreach Team.

What we do

The Cognition and Learning team support school practitioners who are including pupils with cognition and learning needs. Children and young people with Cognition and Learning difficulties may struggle to access or engage with learning. We work with school staff to help them better understand the needs of pupils with additional C&L needs and how they can be best supported.

The C&L needs of individual pupils may present in a variety of ways, including:

• Difficulties with reading, writing, and recording their work
• Difficulties with spelling and phonics
• Difficulties with maths and counting
• Lower than age expected ability in specific curriculum areas or Topic work
• Moderate to significant learning difficulties
• Diagnosed medical conditions which may affect abilities to learn
• Difficulty with processing, memory, and recall.

The C&L team can offer:

• Training for school staff in techniques and approaches to support learning
• Support for differentiation of the curriculum to meet the pupil’s needs
• Support for development of bespoke planning for those pupils whose needs are significantly different to their peers
• Mentoring in the classroom to model and embed new approaches

We help schools, parents/carers and pupils (where appropriate) to develop support plans to help pupils work to the best of their ability and to make suitable steps of progress. As part of this, we complete observations, model strategies to school staff and offer advice and guidance. We may work directly with pupils as appropriate. We are a team of specialist teachers who support teachers in schools. We work closely with the other specialist education services, when required, as sometimes children and young people with cognition and learning needs also have needs in other areas such as communication and interaction, speech and language or social emotional and mental health. We also work closely with a wide range of other services such as Early Help, Education Welfare and Health.