Our Vision, Ethos and Values
We are a different kind of school, to the sort of mainstream school most of our young people have previously attended. Often, they may have struggled to fully engage with their home school, due to a diagnosed medical or mental health condition.
We have friendly, caring and kind teaching and support staff with many years of experience of working with young people with a complex range of mental health challenges and neurodivergent diagnoses.
We have a school dog (Charlie Brown) whose friendly and inquisitive manner has a calming and reassuring influence on the young people he meets.
We are flexible but boundaried. We personalise learning to enable our students to make rapid progress.
We identify (in detail) any barriers to, or gaps in, each young person’s learning, whilst simultaneously supporting and enhancing their social and emotional wellbeing.
We don’t have a uniform, but we do have a shared sense of community. Read about our uniform policy here.
We’re small enough so that our young people feel valued, seen and heard, but we’re big enough to be able to offer most of the lessons taught in a mainstream school and many more besides.
We have quiet spaces such as our garden and our sensory room, and social spaces like our communal kitchen.
We have our own well-equipped gym and ‘The Oval’ a space for table tennis, yoga and meeting as a community.
We have small, modern, well-resourced classrooms with state-of-the-art technologies to engage all our learners.
We have very low staff/student ratios compared to mainstream schools, so we often notice things about a young person that can get overlooked or even lost in bigger more anonymous educational settings.
We regularly organise trips and visits to extend young peoples’ learning beyond the classroom and we have strong links with many organisations that enrich learning on our school site.
We listen to parents and carers about their hopes and concerns, and we recognise that no one knows their child like they do.
We prioritise and maintain productive good dialogues with parents and carers and actively give and seek feedback about their child’s experience of our school.
We identify and celebrate incremental, academic and emotional milestones and reflect them back to students, so they can build their confidence and identify the progress they’ve made themselves.
We often identify talent and potential that a young person may be unaware of or (up until that point) has been unrealised.
We demonstrate and hold a confidence in each young person’s ability, until they are ready to build their confidence independently.
We give our young people a social and emotional tool kit, that prepares them to be able to cope with occasional setbacks on their learning journey, and the teaching and learning to achieve their academic and educational goals. They do so with a renewed passion to pursue their own individual talents with resilience and self-confidence.
We enable all our young people to reintegrate into their home school (with any reasonable adjustments) or to successfully transition to the next stage in their educational journey.
We cannot change a young person’s past experiences, but we can significantly influence their future educational outcomes.
We are extremely ambitious for all our learners.