Sense Training and the Importance of Sport for SEND Participants.
Written by: Dan Hughes, Outreach & Arts Administrative Intern
Online Sense Training
In preparation for the delivery and supervision of sports and music workshops at the BTP event I enrolled in a Zoom training session with Sense. Running for approximately two hours, the session was aimed at equipping inexperienced practitioners with the skills required to begin delivering SEND-inclusive sports classes. Various facts and statistics were provided at the beginning of the session that hammered home the importance of encouraging exercise in SEND participants whilst also emphasising the importance of each child feeling a sense of involvement, independence and achievement within sports activities. We discussed our initial thoughts on what an inclusive sports workshop should achieve within the Zoom chat function, as well as in breakout rooms with other practitioners. Here we were provided with the specific requirements of one SEND individual and asked to discuss what we would need to consider when delivering an SEND-inclusive snooker workshop for the said individual (in our case an elderly lady with partial sight and early signs of dementia). Later, we were shown instructive videos on how more mainstream sports (in this case climbing, football and tennis) could be best adapted for SEND participants, ensuring that the above aspirations could be reached for each participant. Having taken in these examples, we then returned to our breakout rooms to discuss how we might deliver our own adapted sports class (our group focused on tennis).
My main learning point from the session was on just how abstracted a sport can become from its mainstream form for the delivery of an effective SEND sports class – experiencing the core concepts within a given sport is far more important than aiming to perform a sport as closely to its mainstream form as possible.
For example, we were taught how the act of scoring a goal in football could be adapted to the needs of most participants without the act obviously resembling a traditional goal. For those participants with little function in their legs for example, aiming and then throwing/rolling a soft ball towards a given area (two posts, a net, a practitioner’s outstretched arms) was perfectly sufficient in fulfilling a sense of achievement within their sports class.
Indeed, my other main learning point from the session was that celebrating the achievements of a participant was just as important as their participation itself. As with the activities themselves, we learnt how celebrations could be adapted for a variety of specific SEND requirements (waving coloured ribbons emphatically for a participant with partial-hearing for example, rather than the usual cheering and clapping).
Although my primary role on the day of the BTP event was to deliver music workshops, I also felt confident enough to supervise some sports sessions thanks to my Sense training.
I was pleased to see in the basketball session that the mainstream sport had been adapted not only in its delivery of the sport itself, but in how equipment had been adapted. Hula hoops had largely replaced the traditional and difficult-to-reach basketball hoops of the sports hall (although I did witness a few SEND adults aiming at these!) and traditional basketball balls had been replaced with much softer and lighter balls.
As a result no injuries were recorded and instead what I witnessed was an ease of access as SEND children sat on the floor and rolled/threw balls towards the hula hoops being held by the session leads in a fashion very similar to the football example described above.
Later in the day when I resumed my musical duties, my co-lead Gabriela and I found that we were able to momentarily unite our music workshop with the Windmill Boxing club’s boxing drills. As we encouraged participation for our music workshop outside our performance space with a rhythmic call-and-response game, the boxing group lead Sinan brought out his young participants and instructed them to “box on the beat”. At this moment, we had filled a corner of the courtyard with both mainstream and SEND children adults, half of them responding to rhythmic prompts with accessible percussion instruments, the other half responding with boxing movements. Here then we have another example of where a mainstream sport (boxing) has been abstracted from its traditional form and fitted into a group activity that encourages inclusive, interactive participation.
