Cognus Therapies Occupational Therapist, Helen Gardner supports the Physical Education department at an SEN school to ensure that all students can develop skills in physical exercise
Ensuring access to the curriculum is one of the most important roles we have as therapists at Cognus Limited. Helen Gardner, Lead Occupational Therapist has been working alongside Mr Stratton, Lead Teacher of Physical Education (PE) at Carew Academy to ensure that physical activities and exercises have been graded and adapted to meet needs and abilities of all the students.
Helen has recently been involved in working collaboratively with the PE department in assisting with curriculum design and with planning specific lessons enabling the development of gross motor skills of all students with particular focus on physical exercise, body awareness, balance, coordination and control.
Working in a collaborative way allows for the sharing of specialist knowledge amongst colleagues and provides opportunities for occupational therapy (OT) to be embedded into the daily curriculum.
Lead Teacher of Physical Education, Mr Stratton reported that: “It has been a real pleasure to work with the Helen and the OT team, it has built the foundations for our schemes of work and allowed us to embed therapy into our curriculum. This has been particularly useful with our Skills for Life students and also extended our knowledge as a teaching team. Our recent Ofsted inspector was very impressed with how as a school we are working together to find different approaches to support our cohort of students”.
