At Abingdon House School, accessibility isn’t an ‘add-on’ or a specialist intervention for selected pupils. It is the foundation of every learning experience. Assistive technology is woven seamlessly into daily teaching, empowering students to work with confidence and independence.
It offers a powerful example of what truly inclusive, technology-enabled education can achieve.
“These tools allow me to achieve…”
Accessibility is built into everything we do at Abingdon House School, and technology plays a crucial role in tailoring our teaching to the unique learning profiles of our students.
We are the only SEN school in the UK to be accredited as a Google Reference school, and our approach has been recognised with a number of accolades. We’ve received the award for Best Personalised Learning at the National Google Reference School Awards and were awarded ‘Best use of Technology’ at the TES School Awards, 2025.
This recognition reflects the world-leading work Abingdon House School has been doing to remove barriers to learning for our students.
School-wide accessibility
Training for staff, parents and students ensures a high level of fluency and accessibility tools and approaches for all, not only a select few. Some of the key initiatives and policies we have throughout the school include:
- Universal designs: the use of pre-designed templates for all learning materials and presentations, with pastel backgrounds, left justified text, and large sans-serif fonts throughout.
- Visual supports: the use of visual timetables and social stories to help students understand and anticipate daily routines.
- Laptops for all: the provision of individual Chromebooks for all students and staff with all learning materials housed in Google classroom.
- Assistive technology: universal access to voice typing and screen reader technology.
- Multimodal feedback: the ability to access feedback on school work through a variety of methods such as written comments or verbal recordings.
Personalised learning
In addition to these schoolwide features and templates, we tailor our approach to individual student needs through personalised ‘technology diets’. For this we conduct a holistic evaluation of each student’s handwriting, typing and voice typing skills. We use this information to create personalised recommendations about each student’s preferred methods for accessing their learning, whether voice typing, typing or handwriting, and include any other features they require. Students have a say in their own technology diets giving them ownership over their learning and classroom experience.
By removing barriers to learning and fostering student agency, technology-driven personalised learning has had a really positive impact on students’ well-being and academic success.
Mason, a senior school student who graduated in 2025, described how he benefitted from the use of accessibility features.
“I was able to write everything I wanted in my head. Without the tools I could have a plan for a paragraph and would only get one or two sentences down in a lesson. With them, I could actually get the whole paragraph down in a minute or less. Accessibility features allowed me to access work more easily. I had a better work rate and achieved things that I never thought were possible”.
Mason thrived with the support of a personalised learning approach – sitting and passing his GCSE maths exam a year earlier than expected.
By Peter Reeves, Head of Digital Education Training, Abingdon House School and Cavendish Education. Peter has been recognised as a Google for Education Certified Innovator.
