Writing, practice, and position from Tapping Frog Education — on SEN, performing arts, movement, creativity, and what inclusive education actually requires.
Long-form writing on performing arts education, SEN practice, movement, creativity, and inclusive approaches to learning. Grounded in what actually happens in classrooms and specialist settings rather than policy abstraction.
Movement is not a reward for good behaviour or a break from learning — it is the biological pathway to focus itself. Drawing on current neuroscience and classroom research, this article makes the case for structured movement as essential instructional design, with practical guidance for every setting.
An evidence-grounded examination of how movement therapy works for children with additional needs — the mechanisms behind the outcomes, how to measure what is actually changing, and what adaptation looks like in practice across different SEN contexts.
The relationship between physical movement and executive function development in early years is well-evidenced. This article draws out the practical implications for early years settings — what movement provision actually changes, and why readiness is not just about sitting still.
Academic success is routinely measured by what children can do while seated and still. This article makes the case — drawing on research and direct observation — that structured movement is not the enemy of academic focus. For many children, it is the precondition for it.
The pressure on children's out-of-school time has increased significantly. This article examines what the evidence says about the relative developmental value of homework and structured physical activity — and what the balance should look like for primary-age children.
Creativity is consistently listed as a priority skill for the future workforce — and consistently treated as a peripheral curriculum subject. This article argues for parity: explicit teaching, cross-curricular embedding, and assessment approaches that value process as well as product.
A selection of educational programmes and engagements with documented approaches and outcomes. These are real settings, real children, and real results — shared with appropriate care for the individuals involved.
A structured movement-based programme designed to improve attention, executive function, early learning behaviours, and motor competence in children aged 3–6, delivered in a mainstream early years setting. The programme was built on peer-reviewed research and adapted to the specific context — not a generic intervention, but a designed response to observed need.
The case illustrates how creative and movement-based approaches, when properly planned and grounded in evidence, produce measurable developmental gains — and how early years settings can integrate this kind of provision without specialist infrastructure.
Read the full case study →An ongoing movement-therapy programme supporting emotional regulation, executive function, communication, and learning readiness for learners aged 11–19 in a UK special school setting. The programme worked with young people with a range of additional and complex needs, using structured movement as a route to engagement for learners for whom other approaches had limited effect.
The case demonstrates how movement-based therapeutic practice can be embedded in a specialist secondary setting — and what sustained, relationship-based provision achieves over time that brief interventions cannot.
Read the full case study →Tapping Frog Education's advocacy is practice-led rather than policy-centred. These are the positions that shape what we do and how we work — views formed in classrooms and specialist settings rather than committees, and advanced through the quality of what we deliver and how we discuss it publicly.
"Education without exception is not a slogan. It is a position — that every child has a valid way of learning, and that the system's failure to find it is the system's failure, not the child's."
In most school timetables, the arts are positioned as enrichment: something layered on top of the core curriculum when time and budget allow. Our position is that this is backwards. For a significant proportion of children — and particularly for those with additional needs or who struggle with conventional academic routes — drama, movement, and creative expression are not optional extras. They are a primary route to communication, regulation, and engagement.
An education system that treats the arts as peripheral produces outcomes that reflect that choice: children who could access learning through creative approaches are instead measured against modes of engagement they cannot yet reach. We work against that outcome directly, and advocate for it publicly wherever the opportunity arises.
Read: Creativity as a Core Competency ↗The design of most school days is premised on stillness as the context for learning. The evidence does not support this. For many children, and especially for children with ADHD, sensory processing differences, and high physical activity needs, structured movement is not a distraction from academic engagement — it is what makes academic engagement possible.
We advocate for movement to be treated as a curriculum priority rather than a physical education afterthought, and for schools to understand that the children who most need to move are also the children most likely to be penalised for doing so. The research on this is not contested. The practice is.
Read: The Role of Movement in Academic Success ↗Inclusive education is widely stated as a priority. In practice, it often means a standard provision with a few adaptations for children who do not fit it — which is not the same thing. Genuinely inclusive educational practice requires inclusive design from the planning stage: session structures, pacing, communication modes, and assessment approaches that are built for a range of learners, not adjusted for outliers after the fact.
Annarie's SEN background means that every programme she designs begins from this principle. It is not an additional consideration — it is the starting point. We also advance this position in CPD delivery, where much of the impact comes from shifting how practitioners frame the design problem in the first place.
Comparative educational research — and the Finnish model in particular — is frequently invoked in UK educational debate without much rigour about what is and is not transferable. We engage with this literature seriously rather than selectively. The elements of high-performing systems that are most evidenced and most transferable tend to be: strong investment in teacher education and autonomy, reduced high-stakes testing, and a genuine commitment to equity as a design principle rather than a stated value.
These are not radical positions. They are what the evidence consistently says. We hold them because we think children's outcomes should follow the evidence rather than the prevailing policy fashion.
Read: Lessons for Positive Reform — Learning From Finland →Resilience — as a capacity for young people to understand risk, adapt to disruption, and engage as active members of their communities — is not currently treated as a curriculum priority. We argue that it should be. Climate change, technological dependency, supply-chain fragility, and the erosion of practical life skills are reshaping the world our children will inherit. Preparing them for it is not pessimism. It is responsibility.
This is not about adding another subject. It is about a new lens applied to the curriculum that already exists — embedding climate literacy, practical preparedness, critical systems understanding, and community responsibility across Geography, PSHE, Science, Food Technology, Design & Technology, and Business Studies, from primary school through to professional formation in higher education.
For learners with SEN — many of whom cope poorly with change and for whom resilience learning requires particularly careful design — this position matters most. We have developed specific curriculum guidance addressing autism, demand avoidance, anxiety, trauma, and sensory needs within resilience education, grounded in the principle that predictable responses to unpredictable events are a more effective and more accessible model of resilience than generalised tolerance of uncertainty.
This position connects directly to Simon Boor's broader advocacy for national resilience infrastructure, including written evidence submitted to the House of Lords National Resilience Committee (ref. NLR0007, April 2026) proposing a Cabinet-level Office of National Resilience.
Resilience Belongs in the Curriculum — article →
Policy Position Statement: Embedding Resilience in the UK Education System →
If any of this connects with something you are working on — whether as a school, a family, or a fellow practitioner — we would be glad to hear from you.
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