ABSTRACT
If you are a support assistant or nursery nurse with particular responsibility for supporting one or more named children with significant disabilities in a mainstream school, this chapter is written particularly for you. It doesn’t matter whether you are called a special needs assistant, an inclusion assistant, a special support assistant or a teaching assistant - the issues are just the same. Some of you may have been in the same school for a number of years and suddenly be asked to work with a child with a disability you have never encountered before. Others will have been appointed specifically to support a named child. Whatever the case, the most important thing is for you to be clear about why you are there.
