Additionally Resourced Provision (ARP) and SEN Units Policy 2025
What is an Additional Resourced Provision (ARP)?
Many young people with special educational needs can make better, more sustained progress when they attend mainstream schools. An Additional Resourced Provision (ARP) is a provision, within a mainstream school, designed to provide specialist and targeted support for children with long-term Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND). ARPs are additionally funded, which means that a school ARP receives additional resources.
They are able to offer:
- teaching staff and support staff with additional knowledge, skills, expertise and allocated time in a particular area of SEND
- specialist environments which support the individual special educational needs of each child
- lessons in mainstream classes, where appropriate for the individual child, but with additional specialist resources and teaching
Each ARP specialises in a particular area of special educational needs, and places are allocated according to the specific needs of the child or young person. Information on this is specified further in the guidance.
The areas relate to the areas of need set out by the Department for Education in The SEND Code of Practice 2015 are:
- communication and interaction
- cognition and learning
- social, emotional and mental health difficulties
- sensory and or physical needs
Whilst doing this however, we recognise as a council that not all children with SEND needs clearly fit into one area of need and therefore, we have responded to this by introduction of provision for children who may have one or two prominent areas of need.
Each ARP is an integral part of the school. Pupils will spend time in the ARP and, where appropriate, time in mainstream. This will be agreed so that their access is fully successful, through careful and adapted planning by the mainstream class teacher, supported by the Special Education Needs Co-ordinator (SENCo), parents and the council.
In Stockton-on-Tees, ARP classrooms are devised for optimal space in units of 10 and 1 to 2 adults, children shall not be admitted into the space in addition to this, as to ensure that the special educational needs provision for those children accessing the provision is not detrimentally impacted.
