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BCM Children’s Worker, Laura MacDonald has particular expertise in the area of special educational needs and reports on the Children's Team's response to the higher needs they have encountered.

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'The aim of BCM’s Children’s Team is for every child in Birmingham to have a basic understanding of who Jesus is and what he has done. We are passionate that every child includes those with additional needs. And so for 15 years the team has been visiting several special needs schools across the city. At the moment we have 5 SEN schools on our books.

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Over the years our approach has been to deliver one assembly and occasional lessons per term in each of these schools. The assembly would consist of a streamlined version of the Bible story that we were offering in mainstream schools. Instead of a sketchboard we use props, support signing (only signing keywords) and pictures for emotions or tricky concepts.

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Post-Covid we saw a marked increase in needs in these schools and realised our usual assembly model was no longer engaging the children. In one school where, pre-Covid, most children would have been able to sit and engage with a 10-minute assembly, now almost none of the children could do so. Whilst we were technically reaching these children, we were not accomplishing our aim of helping them to see who Jesus is and what he has done. Something needed to change.

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We now offer a more tailored service to our SEN schools. In the schools that are still happy to have a whole school assembly we rethought how we deliver these to create more consistency, so the children know what to expect. For example, at the start of each assembly we open a box file decorated to look like a Bible and take out a clue to the story. Throughout the story we aim to engage as many senses as possible by creating sound effects, having things to touch or smell, or getting the children to do an action, like pretending to walk if the characters are on a journey.

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For both assemblies and lessons last term we had several sensory boxes containing objects that linked to the Christmas story. The children could open the boxes, touch and explore the contents and work out what part of the story they represented. This sensory element had been somewhat lost during the pandemic due to the extra risk of spreading infection among these particularly vulnerable children.

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This Christmas provision for SEN schools was well received, with one teacher commenting, “The children engaged well with the lesson. It was paced very well and had a good mix of information, input and hands-on learning."'

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As a whole the Children’s Team, staff and volunteers, delivered 18 Christmas assemblies with puppets, drama and quiz, and 70 Christmas lessons. Each session examined the real reason for the season. Great questions children asked were, “How do you believe in a God that created the world and came down to earth?” and “Why does Jesus have so many names?”

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