Sensory Needs Service (SNS)

The Sensory Needs Service (SNS) provides support to Hearing Impaired (HI) and Visually Impaired (VI) children across all ages and ability ranges and their families. They also provide guidance to educational settings and other professionals supporting children with sensory needs.

The SNS team works directly with children and their families, pre-schools and schools to support and promote inclusion of children with HI (in a range of settings). They also run four Hearing Support Facilities (HSF) in East Sussex in which our highest need pupils are placed.

The Sensory Needs Service respond to all referrals by first contacting the family or the school, dependent on the age of the child. This might be to request further information or to give advice over the phone and say what the next step is likely to be.

An initial visit may be arranged so they can assess the child in situ; they then use nationally agreed criteria for assessing the level of need for each referral. This is the “Eligibility Criteria for Scoring Support Levels” produced by the National Sensory Impaired Partnership (NatSIP). It comprises a series of questions with graded responses and a total is calculated giving a rough guide as to the level of support that might be needed for each pupil.

The service also take into account their own professional opinion of the level of need and the educational placement of that pupil e.g. where a severely visually impaired pupil is based in a special school their score may be equivalent to a pupil in mainstream but the level of support might vary as the strategies used in a special school can often mirror those we would be suggesting so additional support is not required.

Support for children with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) is available from other services, such as CLASS. Therefore, direct support is not available for this from the Sensory Needs team.