5 Reasons to Consider Working With SEN Students
There are many reasons to consider supporting SEN students in your future career. These reasons could be for personal reasons or professional growth. This article will explore five of the reasons you should work with SEN students. These are our personal choices; there are countless other reasons we could list, but we would love to hear your reasons. Please let us know in the comments why you believe working with SEN students is a great decision.
1. Making A Difference
One reason to work with SEN students is the difference you can make in their lives. They can struggle with their development and education progress, which can affect their future and life goals. As an SEN teacher , teaching assistant , or support worker, you can uniquely help them with their challenges and push them to reach their full potential.
Your direct help can support them in various ways, such as increasing their confidence, developing social skills, and improving academic performance. This will improve their academic results and enhance their quality of life by teaching them life skills they might otherwise have not developed.
2. Personal Satisfaction
Working with SEN students can give you a high sense of personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment. Your time spent working with them will have a direct impact. Seeing a student achieve a goal they could not have reached before working with you can be extremely rewarding. Or to see a student manage a challenge they could not do before you started working together. You will be able to see the difference you have made to their lives directly.
This can take many forms, such as helping a student prepare for a lesson that they are nervous about or at the other extreme helping a student prepare to go to university. Whereas in some careers, you never get to see the difference you make, anyone working in the SEN sector can see what they have done and be proud of themselves and their students.
3. Developing Valuable Skills
You will have the opportunity to develop many valuable skills while supporting SEN students. These skills are useful in many different careers and are highly sought after by employers. Working with SEN students provides a unique opportunity to develop a wide range of valuable skills that are useful in the SEN sector and can easily transfer across to many other career paths.
Empathy is an important skill you will develop by working with SEN students. You will need to understand and relate to the experiences of SEN students, which will enhance your sense of empathy. This will help you to understand their challenges, which could be from social interactions to concentration difficulties. This increased empathy will make you more understanding and compassionate in your both your personal and professional life.
Patience is another skill; SEN students often need a lot of patience due to personal difficulties. You may need to take things slower depending on the student, or you may need to consider how to explain tasks differently to different students. This skill will allow you to get to know your students and how they best learn.
The ability to problem solve effectively is something you learn by supporting SEN students. Every student is different. They need different and creative teaching approaches to make lessons accessible to all your students and reflect their individual personalities. This will prepare you to handle unexpected situations and think critically about challenges and solutions. These skills can be transferable to careers outside education, such as social work, counselling, and corporate jobs. Employers will look for people who can show these skills in their work environment.
3. Diverse and Dynamic Work Environment.
No day is the same when you work in SEND. It is a diverse and dynamic work environment where every student is different and has their own challenges, needs and personal strengths, which makes every day varied. You may be helping a student with dyslexia one day and a student with autism the next, but the challenges are completely different, which means you will need to adapt.
Your students will also come from different cultural and economic backgrounds. Over time, working with different languages and cultures will become customary to you, giving you a cultural perspective that will allow you to work easily with any student. This will enrich your work and keep every day different.
Each student requires you to use different learning and management techniques. You should keep up to date on new developments in SEN by learning about different conditions for example, ADHD and Autism, and know how to best support students with these conditions. The SEN sector is ever-evolving, which makes every day exciting, and you continuously learn and develop.
4. High Demand and Job Security
There is a high demand for people who can provide SEN student support, which has created a growing job market with many opportunities. The growth has been due to rising SEN student numbers, improvements to the sector, and a greater emphasis on providing more significant support. The number of SEN students is increasing, and as a result, schools are hiring more SEN teachers and teaching assistants. There is strong job security in the SEN sector, with many opportunities for advancement.
The increased demand means that your role should give you career stability as schools focus on growing their existing SEN staff team. There are also numerous opportunities for professional growth, and as you gain experience in your role, you may wish to move into more advanced roles, such as becoming a SENCO.
5. Opportunities To Specialise
Lastly, working with SEN students provides numerous opportunities. There are many ways you can specialise in different SEN areas to take on new challenges. The most common areas are highly specific areas such as speech and language therapy and autism support. But you can choose whichever field you wish to focus on. Choosing a specialism lets you focus purely on one area and gain expertise. This expertise allows you to help students more and allows for greater career opportunities.
There are numerous qualifications you could gain such as a Masters degree in Special Education or a certification in dyslexia support or similar. Schools often provide development opportunities and have access to funding to allow their staff to specialise in skills the school needs.
Working with SEN students can be an enriching career that allows you to make a clear difference in the lives of SEN students while developing valuable skills, enjoying a diverse work environment and gaining strong job security and professional growth; there are many benefits to considering this career path for yourself.
If you're ready to make a change, this could be your ideal career. To see the latest vacancies available, please visit www.senploy.co.uk today and find your next job!