Shannon was my SEN son’s one to one swimming teacher for two years 2021 - 2023. It’s thanks to her amazing teaching that my son learnt to swim and is confident and safe in the water.

My son has complex learning disabilities including Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). He can’t cope being taught in a group of children or class and needs one to one support and supervision to keep him focused.

Shannon completely understands the needs of SEN children and adapts to each individual to create a lesson plan that works for them. Every week Shannon would introduce brilliant creative ideas that captured my son’s attention and focus and at the same time it was teaching him to swim and learn different techniques. Shannon completely understood the need for my son to have breaks in between learning and make the lesson fun. Each term she put together a brilliant visual lesson plan which showed what was going to happen next during lesson using lots of pictograms. My son is a visual learner and can struggle with verbal instructions so these visual aids were great.

Part of helping children with ASD is understanding that they need to know what is going to happen next and what to expect otherwise it can cause them a lot of anxiety. Shannon would share the lesson plan with me as I could also use it to prepare my son for the lesson and this helped me enormously in helping to reassure him about what was going to happen. This is so important in helping to keep an ASD child’s anxiety as low as possible as they have difficulty in regulating their emotions.

It was a joy seeing my son progress in his swimming and confidence in the water. I feel so fortunate to have met Shannon as swimming lessons that suit SEN children are very difficult to find. We were lucky to have such a patience, understanding creative teacher. My son’s behaviour can be very challenging but Shannon was completely accepting of it and managed him with understanding kindness and patience. I completely trusted her with him in the water and she was clearly 100% dedicated in teaching practice and went above and beyond to help my son. I would absolutely highly recommend Shannon to anyone thinking of swimming lessons for a child with learning disabilities.