Alternative Provision

Before a student can engage with and retain learning tasks and skills there are a number of key skills to master. From being able to sensorially and emotionally coregulate in a a learning space, to being able to build relationships with our teaching team and peers, we can travel at a young person’s pace, providing the environment necessary for them to build resilience and self esteem.

We start with 1:1 mentoring and teaching, working towards shared adult attention then independent work as important classroom skills.

Students are not isolated from others, and work alongside each other on their own individual paths and using individualised adaptions and resources which mean no-one looks “different” from peers, because everyone is unique. Confident learners in the space and disabled adults working with their own adaptions model how no two people’s working journey looks the same.

The opportunity to meet peers in a structured environment- and maybe take brain and sensory breaks together, creates a sense of being a part of a community and work on navigating peer co-worker and friendship relationships and recognising the differences.

Ready to learn is a really important stage for your people who have been unable to access anything outside the home for some time as it helps to re-establish good learning behaviours and practices and create a sense of becoming part of a community once more.

Core skills in Maths and English will be revisited in a ready to learn package if they are not disruptive to the processes of gaining trust. Other skill and confidence based activities may include cooking, textiles, art, music, cooperative gaming, dance and physical literacy skills and any other subject areas which enhance a young person’s learning confidence.

In this Ready to Learn phase, if we identify any questions as to why certain things are barriers to engagement for a young person, we may deploy some hours of specialist investigation and intervention from our professional team.

Most of our Primary learners require an extended period of “Ready to Learn” focus prior to being able to start learning.

To build confidence our English curriculum will start with pencil skills, though art or keyboard skills through games that build typing confidence to help facilitate recording. Games are used around techniques including morphology, phonics and picture supported sight word recognition to help promote exploration of word level work. Specialist computer programmes may be used to help construct sentences with increased vocabulary and sentence structure whilst supporting those worried by their spelling skills. Text level work is linked to special interests and also has an awareness of the issues around abstract language, inference and deduction for neurodivergent young people. Comic production and illustration is used with verbal storytelling to engage creativity.

Maths Skills are taught through real life practice and games and then through our comprehensive curriculum resources individually mapped for a students strengths and weaknesses. Skills are broken into small steps, consolidated and opportunities are given for over-learning, but the journey is at the student’s pace rather than driven by the curriculum, which helps young people who can struggle to embed skills when topics move on before they are ready.

Our Science teacher runs an experiments and practical science session each week for our Primary learners and this can be cascaded to students who are not able to attend that hour or can’t access small group sessions.