Sue Lewis is a qualified teacher and teacher of the deaf, and Associate SEND and Inclusion Adviser with BDSIP.
Alongside her work with BDSIP, Sue has worked in mainstream schools, resourced provision, special schools and local authority support and advisory services. She has led training courses for teachers of the deaf and audiologists at the University of Birmingham, Oxford Brookes University and Mary Hare/ University of Hertfordshire/ Oxford Brookes University and contributed to courses at the University of Manchester. Her specialist research areas are working with families, language acquisition and assessing and monitoring progress. Sue was the senior educational consultant for the Ewing Foundation from 1992 to 2005. During and after this time she was commissioned by the Department of Education to lead two projects for Early Support, the devising of a multiagency audit tool and of developmental journals/ monitoring protocols for joint use by families and practitioners. She was an Early Support trainer and regional facilitator for SEND initiatives linked to both Early Support and the Lamb Enquiry findings.
Sue has been an Ofsted inspector since 1994, acting as both a team and a lead inspector of primary, secondary and all through provision, resourced provision and special schools. In 2012 she joined SERCO as a managing inspector, having responsibility for the inspection of specialist provision including special schools. In 2015 she transferred into Ofsted full time, first as an inspector and then as a senior research lead in the Research and Evaluation team. In this role she was the research lead for surveys, projects and reporting on obesity, behaviour, the review of the first 10 and then the first 50 LA SEND inspections, MATS and what schools do to promote good behaviour and manage poor behaviour. Sue has recently retired from Ofsted but sits on their ‘expert panel’ for their new SEND project exploring the experiences of SEND pupils within mainstream school. In 2016 she was awarded an MBE for services related to children with educational needs.