Meet Yasmine 

Yasmine Dhillon is the Deputy Headteacher – Inclusion at Newham PRUs, and began our Advanced SEND Leader programme in November 2024.

She describes the apprenticeship course as having “fundamentally reshaped” her professional identity, helping her make a significant impact on the lives of young people in her PRU.

In the video (and interview write-up below), Yasmine describes the impact her team has been able to have – something she credits in no small part to her apprenticeship programme and her coach.

“The course’s framework provided a critical bridge between my practical, on-the-ground experience as an Assistant Headteacher SENCO and the high-level theoretical and strategic demands of senior leadership,” Yasmine explains.

For Yasmine, this meant a key shift to a broader mindset; “it helped me transition from looking at pupils I was working with through a SEND lens to an inclusion lens,” she says.

This involved thinking about inclusion more strategically and digging into the data. In doing so, Yasmine realised she wanted to work at a higher level with colleagues across the schools, so they could better support these pupils, many of whom had experienced trauma.

She applied for a more senior role and was successful. This allowed her to put her new skills in data analysis and strategic leadership to use, working with colleagues to devise an ambitious five year plan for the PRU. The team achieved a 20-fold increase in the number of pupils returned to a mainstream setting or to an alternative setting via an ECHP.

Yasmine’s five-year strategy involves working on an outreach model with mainstream schools in the borough and aims to place Newham PRUs as a centre of excellence at a national level.

“The academic rigor has given me the confidence to articulate my practice with authority and influence whole-school strategy, knowing my proposals are backed by research and established leadership principles,” Yasmine explains.

“Structuring some of the tasks around the What? So what? And Now What? really helped me make sure everything I was spending time on as a SENCO was meaningful.”

One of the things she has enjoyed the most has been the application of business models to an educational environment. “That was something I wasn’t familiar with but it was really interesting seeing it applied to a school,” she says. “I’ve built really useful skills I didn’t even know I needed.”

Yasmine is keen to point out how useful the support of her apprenticeship tutor and leadership coach has been.

“The coaching is expertly lined up. I’m working with a coach who has great knowledge of how a PRU works and has already given me real, concrete examples of how I could break down some of the barriers I was facing.”

“I felt a real growth in my professional skills and the way I was working, and during the course I’ve grown so much in confidence,” she adds.

Overall, she reflects, it’s been a “brilliant” experience that’s “very different to other courses I’ve been on.”

Yasmine has already recommended the Advanced SEND Leader programme to one of the other senior leaders from her PRU who has recently started their apprenticeship journey.

“If you really want to make an impact on reducing social exclusions,” Yasmine says, “then I think this is definitely a course for you.”