Carrie Weston - MA Special Educational Needs

The M.A. special education needs is a new degree. It's a new postgraduate qualification. It started in September 2012. We very much had in mind the government Green Paper when we developed it and the movements in special education at the current time. So, we cover specifically the areas of dyslexia and autism as well as behavior, general inclusion, and research and dissertation. We hope that the students that join us to do the M.A. in special education needs have a thorough grounding in specific areas of special education as well as in inclusive education and they are also able to research and become practitioners who reflect on their own practice as well.

All the teaching on the M.A. in special education needs takes place within the Cuss School of Education and Communities on Stratford campus. It's a brand new building, and we have totally up to date facilities in terms of how we can present our lectures and being able to interact with our students online when they're away from the university. We are fully resourced in terms of our staff and their capabilities and the experiences that they can offer. They're educated to Ph.D. level. They all have experience in the fields or in things such as educational psychology as well as in teaching.

The majority of students that come to study on the M.A. SEN are in practice, so they tend to be working in schools, sometimes in a teaching capacity and they wish to become a SENCO or move into school management. Sometimes they're working in other capacities, non-teaching capacities, and they wish to extend their experience, their knowledge, their criticality in special education. They might go onto things like educational psychology training. They may go onto become inclusion managers and SENCO's within schools. They may go onto management positions with schools.

When students apply to the Master's I'm looking for them, obviously, to have an interest, a particular interest and a genuine interest, in the education of children with special needs. Hopefully some kind of experience, but also they may want to be looking at research development. It could be an area that potentially they're looking to do research in the future. So, I'm looking for somebody who's enthusiastic and somebody who understands what the program is going to be about, and that's why they've made their application.