Movement Therapy in SEN: Mechanisms, Measurement and Classroom Adaptation

The evidence that movement supports learning and regulation in children with SEN is now well-established. What remains less clear, for many practitioners and school leaders, is how to translate that evidence into practice — how to design sessions that address the right mechanisms, how to know whether those sessions are working, and how to adapt delivery for learners whose sensory, motor, and communication profiles vary significantly within a single group.

This article is written for special school practitioners and leaders working at that translation point. It draws on direct experience delivering movement therapy programmes in SEN settings and on the current research base, and it provides three things: an account of the mechanisms through which movement produces change in SEN learners; a session architecture that addresses those mechanisms directly; and measurement tools designed to be collected within the normal flow of school life rather than as an additional burden on already stretched staff.

Why movement therapy works in SEN contexts: the mechanisms

Understanding the mechanisms of change is not merely theoretical. It shapes which activities to include, how to sequence them, and what you are actually observing when you measure outcomes. Three pathways are most relevant to SEN learners, and they operate together rather than sequentially.

Sensory-motor regulation

Many learners with autism, ADHD, and sensory processing differences arrive at school — or arrive at a lesson — in a neurological state that makes learning functionally inaccessible. They are either hyperaroused (overwhelmed, reactive, unable to filter stimuli) or hypoaroused (flat, disengaged, unable to generate the alertness learning requires). Neither state is a choice. Both are products of sensory systems that are working differently, and both close the gateway to sustained attention and participation.

Proprioceptive and vestibular input directly addresses this. Proprioceptive input — graded pressure, resistance, heavy work, and the sensory feedback from muscles and joints during purposeful movement — tends to downshift hyperarousal and produce a calm, grounded, ready state. Vestibular input — movement that changes head and body position, rhythm, balance — can be alerting or calming depending on type and intensity, and is directly implicated in arousal regulation, spatial orientation, and attention. Activities designed to engage these systems are not warming children up for learning. They are restoring the physiological conditions under which learning is possible.

This is why the opening phase of any well-designed SEN movement session matters as much as it does. Predictable, proprioceptively grounding arrival rituals do something concrete: they shift the learner's neurological state in the direction of calm-alert before any cognitive demand is introduced. Without that shift, everything that follows is working against the grain.

Executive function through cognitively loaded movement

Executive functions — inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility — are among the most significant predictors of learning outcomes, and they are precisely the functions most commonly compromised by ADHD, autism, and related profiles. Aerobic movement alone improves executive function; cognitively loaded movement — tasks that make explicit executive function demands within a physical activity — does so more directly and with greater transfer to academic tasks.

Stop/go games require inhibitory control: the learner must override an established motor response when the rule changes. Rule-switching tasks require cognitive flexibility: the response to a signal changes mid-activity and the learner must update their behaviour accordingly. Sequencing tasks engage working memory: the learner holds a movement pattern in mind while executing it. These are not incidentally useful. They are targeted rehearsal of the specific cognitive functions that support classroom engagement and learning access.

In SEN contexts, the executive function demands need to be explicit but accessible — present in every session, but scaffolded to what each learner can currently manage. Choice-making between two movement options rehearses decision-making and early cognitive flexibility. Symbol sequencing introduces working memory demands without verbal load. Simplified rule changes — one rule at a time, signalled visually — maintain the inhibitory practice while keeping the cognitive demand within reach. The scaffold is the design work; the EF rehearsal is the outcome.

"Cognitively loaded movement is not a variation on exercise — it is targeted rehearsal of the specific cognitive functions that determine whether a learner can access classroom learning at all."

Annarie Boor

Expressive communication and relational co-regulation

For learners with limited verbal communication, high anxiety, or significant relational difficulties, movement creates channels for emotional expression and connection that speech cannot yet provide. Emotion-to-movement mapping — finding a physical expression for a feeling, or moving in response to a presented emotion — supports emotional literacy without requiring verbal articulation. Paired mirroring creates moments of joint attention and contingent responsiveness — the relational experience of being seen and responded to — that are foundational to emotional regulation and social development.

This pathway is often the least visible in outcome data and the most transformative in practice. A learner who spends three months building the capacity to maintain paired mirroring for thirty seconds has not just learned a movement skill. They have practised the relational experience of co-regulation — the felt sense of another person moving with them, responding to them, staying with them — in a context where the demands are low enough and the structure clear enough for it to be possible. That experience, accumulated across sessions, builds regulatory capacity that transfers into other relationships and other contexts.

Session architecture

Effective SEN movement sessions follow a consistent four-phase structure. The phases are not interchangeable and their sequencing is deliberate: each creates the conditions for the next. The total session runs between ten and twenty-five minutes — long enough to deliver meaningful neurological and cognitive benefit, short enough to be sustainable within a specialist timetable and within the attention window of the learners it serves.

Adaptations for SEN settings

The four-phase structure is the consistent frame. Everything within it is adaptive. SEN learners in any given group will present with significantly different sensory profiles, motor abilities, and communication needs, and the practitioner's skill is in holding the structure while responding to that variation in real time. Some adaptations are design decisions made in advance; others are responsive adjustments made within the session.

Measuring what changes

Measurement in SEN movement programmes has two purposes. The first is genuinely evaluative: understanding whether the programme is producing the changes it is designed to produce, and adapting it if it is not. The second is accountability: providing school leaders, parents, and multi-disciplinary teams with reviewable evidence that supports audit conversations and IEP review.

Both purposes are best served by measures that are low-burden, embedded in normal session delivery, and aligned with the outcome domains that IEPs are already tracking. The following templates address the four primary outcome domains — regulation, learning access, communication, and motor development. Choose two to four for any given programme, selected on the basis of the IEP priorities for the learners in that group.

"The best measurement is the measurement that actually gets done — which means building it into the session rather than adding it alongside it."

Annarie Boor

Per-session log — completed by support staff

Five-minute observation snapshot

Checklist — updated every 4–6 weeks

Qualitative evidence and school auditability

Quantitative measures tell you whether something is changing. Qualitative evidence tells you what that change looks like — and, critically, it provides the reviewable artefacts that inspectors, parents, and multi-disciplinary teams can actually engage with. Both matter, and neither replaces the other.

Alongside the session logs, collect brief staff notes on transitions — specific observations about what a learner did differently today compared with three weeks ago. Pupil voice, where accessible, adds weight: a symbol choice, a gesture, a moment of spontaneous participation. Photographed resources — the sequence cards used this term, the visual timer, a learner's own movement story — create a portfolio of the programme's material reality. Short reflection logs on adaptations tried and outcomes observed provide the kind of specific, practice-facing evidence that strengthens both internal review and external audit.

These do not require additional time if they are built into the session's closing phase. Two minutes of observation notes at the end of a session, completed by a support staff member while the return-to-learn bridge is happening, yields substantial qualitative data over a half-term without adding to workload.

What the current research shows

The research base for movement therapy in neurodevelopmental conditions has strengthened considerably in recent years. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis by Carcelén-Fraile and colleagues, published in Healthcare (MDPI), examined the effects of physical activity on executive function and emotional regulation across neurodevelopmental disorders and found consistent positive effects — including for inhibitory control, working memory, and emotional regulation — with effect sizes that support physical activity as a meaningful component of SEN intervention, not merely a supplement to it.¹

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatrics examined physical activity interventions and mental health across neurodevelopmental conditions, reporting improvements in anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and overall wellbeing alongside the cognitive gains.² The co-occurrence of emotional and cognitive benefits is consistent with the three-pathway model described above: regulation, executive function, and relational capacity are not separate mechanisms. They are interconnected, and movement therapy that addresses all three produces effects that single-pathway interventions do not.

A 2021 systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology specifically examined dance movement psychotherapy for children with autism, finding improvements in social communication, emotional expression, and engagement that were not achieved through more directive, instruction-based approaches.³ The relational and expressive dimension of movement-based intervention — the aspect most difficult to reduce to a mechanism — is also, in the evidence, the dimension most distinctively effective for social and communicative outcomes. A 2025 systematic review in Frontiers in Public Health confirmed the benefits of school-based active breaks for attention, engagement, and executive function across the broader SEN population.⁴

"The research supports movement therapy not as a supplement to SEN intervention but as a primary mechanism — one that addresses the regulatory, cognitive, and relational foundations from which learning becomes possible."

Annarie Boor

Putting it together: what good practice looks like

Good movement therapy practice in SEN settings is not complicated, but it is precise. The session structure is consistent and sequenced deliberately. The adaptations are planned, not improvised. The measurement is embedded, not added on. The qualitative evidence is collected as a discipline, not as a last-minute audit response. And the return-to-learn bridge — the single most commonly omitted element in practice — is treated as non-negotiable, because without it the session's gains do not carry into the classroom where they are needed.

What changes over time, as a programme matures, is the specificity of the adaptations and the richness of the evidence. In the first six to eight weeks, the practitioner is learning what this group of learners needs and establishing the rituals that reduce anxiety and enable participation. By week twelve, they know which learners need more vestibular input, which need more time in Phase 1, which communication targets are within reach and which need more scaffolding. The programme is no longer being implemented — it is being refined, session by session, around the real people it is serving.

That refinement is the work. And it is, in the end, what distinguishes a movement session from movement therapy.