The Story of Sunlight Learning
Throughout all my teaching career, I (Ann Saunders) always aimed to support parents and help them to continue their child’s learning at home as best I could. However, I never felt that I successfully and fully give them the support they needed and continually looked for ways I could enhance this through my work.
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Just before the pandemic, in 2019, I returned to South India, where I had been born, to see Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) provision within the country. I discovered that in India there are few Special Schools and where they do exist their educational standards are limited. However, whilst visiting a general hospital, I saw that the children's departments there provided some educational support for these Special Needs children. I discovered that parents who could, brought their child with a Learning Difficulty and/or Autism to the hospital and stayed with their child there for 3 months. During this time, the parents were taught educational skills and techniques by educational professionals with their child daily in a ‘classroom’. This provided parents with some skills so that they could continue to teach their child when they return home.
Back in the UK, during the pandemic and ‘lockdown’ in 2020, I was required to provide Home Learning for my pupils who had Autism and Severe Learning difficulties. Through regular phone conversations I tried to help parents to see what ‘Home Learning’ looked like specifically for their child. I tried to share with them many of the different skills and knowledge needed to put 'Home Learning' into action, related to their child's individual learning targets.
I am pleased to have been part of the highly effective educational system in the UK for children with SEND since 1985. However since 2019 I have realised that nearly all the expertise and research into educational practice has been focused and invested into staff within the special school. As a result parents havent been provided with the time or opportunity to gain the knowledge so they can effectively continue their child's education at home. The Sunlight Learning course has been developed to address this discrepancy and empower families so that they can work together with their child's school and extend their child's learning into their home.
