Debra

My experience with special educational needs

With Qualified Teacher Status (2003) and over two decades of experience, I have worked across mainstream and specialist settings — as Director of Learning in a specialist DLD setting, Head of History and Government & Politics, and in 1:1 Learning Support within a mainstream secondary school. My teaching spans GCSE and A-level across History, English and the wider Humanities, with particular strength in supporting pupils with autism, ADHD and PDA profiles, and anxiety-related conditions including OCD — underpinned by my Level 3 qualification in Understanding Mental Health and training with the National Autistic Society on recognising autism in girls. A significant part of my recent practice has focused on EBSA/EBSNA, using trauma-informed, low-demand strategies to help pupils return to learning gradually and sustainably. I am also a long-standing Cambridge International Assistant Examiner in History.

A bit about me

Beyond my professional background, I bring lived experience as a parent of children with additional needs — autism, ADHD, OCD and severe anxiety within my own family. I've had to be tenacious in securing the right support for my sons, including a judicial review and multiple Ombudsman decisions against my local authority, and I spent two and a half years with a son out of education while searching for the right school. Through years of trial and error, I've learned real, practical strategies for managing extreme anxiety, which I bring into how I work with anxious learners — and I understand this system from the parent's side, not just the professional one. That experience has taught me not to take resistance personally and to read what's behind a child's behaviour rather than the behaviour itself. I also recognise that a child's ability isn't always shown in conventional ways, and I look for what a child can do rather than marking them down for how they demonstrate it.

My teaching philosophy

I believe teaching skills matter as much as, if not more than, content — content is often something a student can pick up on their own, but the skills to use it well aren't as easy to self-teach. I make sure I teach exam technique the way examiners themselves mark papers, so students understand exactly what earns marks and why. I love history and the way it repeats itself, and I enjoy weaving old and new stories together to make learning more relatable. I make full use of multimedia, because that's simply part of how modern teaching works, whether we like it or not. I never prepare resources too far in advance — every lesson is dynamic and shaped by how the previous one actually went, not by what I planned days before.

Schedule

Tutoring specialisation

I’m providing tutoring sessions for students with these educational needs: