Where do you start to write an NPQ?!

What’s involved in writing a new NPQ?

At the moment, we’re really excited to begin the process of writing our new NPQ- NPQ for SENCO.

For us, this is such an important qualification! As well as being the new statutory requirement for anyone working as a SENCO, we all know how vitally important it is that all schools are able to offer impactful leadership for pupils with SEND and their families- who are often some of the most vulnerable families in our school community.

It may seem that new NPQs appear by magic (on Blackboard!) but the process of us bringing one together is actually a fairly complex undertaking!

Read on to find out how we write, coordinate, quality assure and then continually improve our NPQ courses.

A new NPQ goes through a number of stages before we’re able to start delivering it.

We begin by gathering a team of writers who can work with us on the new content. It’s essential that any course we deliver is the most useful it can be for people in schools so we work with a cross-phase team of professionals who are currently working in schools so they have the most up-to-date knowledge.

For the NPQ for SENCO this team includes teachers and leaders from special schools, mainstream schools and the university sector. We know that the NASENCO award has invaluable in training SENCOs historically, so we’ve included a number of writers who have been delivering, writing and evaluating the NASENCO award so that valuable learning isn’t lost.

We then meet as a team for a residential and we start the writing process! Working as a group, we think about what the key messages are for future participants as well as looking in great detail at the DFE framework.

We talk together about how to best exemplify that framework and make sure that participants are able to really understand the research base on which the framework is written, and that there’s a good range of examples to show how you could actually apply that research in your school.

It’s important to us that we ‘practice what we preach’ so we also spend time thinking about how adults best learn and how we can make sure that our pedagogical approaches reflect best practice in learning theory as well as being as accessible as possible for participants with different learning needs and disabilities.

These initial materials then go through an approval process with the DFE and EEF. We work with them to make sure that the materials are as strong as possible and that they meet the intended learning outcomes. We work together to refine the materials.

With the materials for NPQ for SENCO, there is also a legal check- to make sure that we’ve included all of the required statutory information and that people who complete our course will have a strong understanding of the legal requirements of SENCOs and SEND practice in a school.

Once we’ve been through this process, the team will write the remaining content and it goes to our proofreader.

From this point, we hand over the content to our digital team who work on ensuring that the materials meet our accessibility requirements and that they are broken down into manageable chunks for busy school leaders to read…

We will start delivering the NPQ for SENCO in November 2024. During the first teaching cycle, we’ll hold focus groups with participants, coaches and facilitators to gather feedback on how the materials are going. This allows us to make adjustments and improvements to the materials before we release the subsequent teaching cycles. This process of continuous improvement is very important to us- it’s also why you won’t be able to see the whole course when you first login…. we want to genuinely listen to our participants and act on their feedback, so it’s important we’re able to make changes when we need to.

We’re open now for applications for the new NPQ for SENCO.