Learning Disability Week in the Classroom

This week is Learning Disability Week! And the theme for 2025 is ‘Do you see me?’ which is all about being seen, heard, and valued. Every single year, the third week of June is dedicated to Learning Disability Week, and it’s all about celebrating and honouring what learning disabilities bring to society. 

Unfortunately, there is still a lot of prejudice and misunderstanding toward those with disabilities of all kinds. It’s especially important as a teacher to ensure that students are educated on learning disabilities and how to support their peers in the classroom and later in life.

The SEND sector

Before we go into the activities you can run in your classroom this week, we wanted to highlight the SEND sector as a whole and the benefits of working in SEND if you’re a teacher looking to progress in your career. 

Along with being able to provide a meaningful impact on students’ lives, you can also specialise, for example in the Autism Spectrum disorder, SLP, and behavioural management. For more information on roles within the SEND sector, click here. 

What can you do in the classroom?

• What is a learning disability?

Depending on the ages of your students, they may already have knowledge of learning disabilities. However, it’s still important to provide education on what learning disabilities are to inform students and spark necessary conversation.

Defined on Mencap’s website: 

“A learning disability is a reduced intellectual ability and difficulty with everyday activities – for example, household tasks, socialising or managing money – which affects someone for their whole life. People with a learning disability tend to take longer to learn and may need support to develop new skills, understand complicated information and interact with other people.” 

Creating and delivering a lesson that is centred around the main learning disabilities that we see in our lives is a great way to raise awareness. You can also debunk what learning difficulties are vs learning disabilities and how to differentiate between the two. 

• Guest speaker 

Another great option is inviting a guest speaker to come and educate students on learning disabilities. This could be someone who has a learning disability or someone who works in that specialism. If you have students within your class who have learning disabilities, having a guest speaker who has a learning disability can also be a great lesson in representation, showing the positives of having a learning disability and what you can still achieve. 

• Learning disability posters

To get students in the mindset of learning about learning disabilities (and ensuring that they’ve retained the information) you can split them into breakaway groups to create giant learning disability posters. This enables students to express themselves creatively, whilst also showing how much information they’ve retained and putting their own spin on what the poster can look like visually. These can then be hung up in the classroom or around the school.

• How to support their peers

Finally, another great exercise is educating students on the type of language they can use when interacting with peers or even people in their day-to-day life who have learning disabilities. Particularly with younger students, there can be insensitivity towards others purely because they aren’t at an age where they know what is and isn’t acceptable to say. 

Demonstrating role plays on how to support, empathise, and uplift others is a great exercise to practice. With the theme being ‘Do you see me?’ it’s crucial that students are taught how to recognise this within the role plays they’re doing. This can also be really effective within secondary schools, especially with students who are at GCSE level and may be thinking about what type of career they’d like to progress into!

Be mindful in the classroom

It’s important that whatever you do in the classroom, you’re mindful of students and even their personal situations at home. For example, you may have students who have a brother or sister with a learning disability, who may be educated on the topic and passionate about it. 

It’s important to focus on a culture of learning in the classroom – regardless of whether that’s from you or a student who is passionate about this. Equally, if you have children within the classroom environment who have learning disabilities, be aware of the sensitivities that they may have to topics or even exercises you choose.

To learn more about Learning Disability Week, click here.