Debra

My experience with special educational needs

I'm a qualified teacher of over twenty years, and most of my work now is with children who aren't in school, or who find school very hard. I've taught in a specialist DLD setting, in a special school for autistic pupils, and 1:1 in a mainstream secondary. I now teach children at home under EOTAS packages and Local Authority contracts. I work a lot with autism, ADHD and PDA profiles, and with anxiety, including EBSA, OCD and selective mutism, all of which I've trained in. If your child has had a hard time with school or with previous tutors, I won't rush them. Nothing much gets learned until a child trusts the person teaching them, so that's where I start. I use structured programmes where they help: Toe by Toe for reading, Talkabout for friendship skills, alongside precision teaching and visual scaffolding. I adapt work so processing and memory demands don't stop a child showing what they know. Lots of children hate getting things wrong. My lessons make being wrong unremarkable.

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

Before anything else, I work on the relationship. No subject learning happens until a student trusts the person teaching them, and with children who've had a bad time at school that can take a while. I'm comfortable with that, and I don't push. I never prepare resources too far in advance, as each lesson shapes the next. With anxious and demand-avoidant students that matters, because I can follow where they are on the day rather than arriving with a plan they have to comply with. I follow interests. Most students will engage with something they care about long before they'll engage with a worksheet, and a great deal can be taught through the thing they already love. I make full use of multimedia. I think teaching skills matter as much as content. Content a student can often pick up alone, but the skills to use it well aren't easy to self teach. Where exams are involved, I teach technique the way examiners actually mark papers, so students know what earns marks and why.

Schedule

Tutoring specialisation

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