Our Ethos and underlying practices

Our client base includes children unable to access a mainstream or specialist setting for a number of reasons including children with trauma around education, adverse childhood experiences and our core base of student with varying neurodiversities.

Our key aim is to move that student forward in their education and equip them to access other spaces. We do this by supporting the development of skills to facilitate learning in a more mainstream setting or work in a traditional workplace where this is appropriate. Alongside this, many of our students will never “grow out of “ or “develop beyond” their challenges, but need to learn mindsets and techniques to help them succeed throughout life working around their needs. To do this we aim to teach the skills of effective self-advocacy starting from the foundations of recognising and working with our own needs to aid self-regulation.

Working together our team and the professionals who add their expertise to our practice help the child or young person identify their needs and find workable solutions to both the underlying issue and the dysregulation it causes. With patience and consistency and constant positive regard for the child or young person, we offer a strong foundation for building a trusting relationship. When regulation and relationships have been established we begin to deliver appropriately challenging curriculum in key areas of traditional learning, but also use a wide arts based program to support the development of study skills and confidence in working with peers and adults.

Underlying all our delivery are foundations in a number of key approaches which inform our approach and are the core of all our staff training. We recognise Total Communication which is an approach that emphasizes the use of all available means of communication to support individuals with communication difficulties. It values and accepts any form of communication, including spoken language, sign language, gestures, facial expressions, body language, visual aids, and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) methods. The goal is to create a supportive environment where individuals can express themselves effectively and participate fully in communication. This is particularly important with neurodivergent children who might be communicating a need clearly through body language, but are not able to communicate that verbally. Using declarative language, a communication style that uses statements and observations to share information, rather than commands or direct questions, we support young people to recognise what they are communicating without words. This approach focuses on directing attention, sharing information or interest, and prompting the listener to think about a solution or respond based on their own understanding. It can be particularly useful with students who don’t have the language or interoception to recognise when they are becoming dysregulated. This can also be very useful with children who have a strong desire for autonomy or who struggle to manage instruction or demands.

We recognise that many of our young people struggle to manage self -regulation- either for sensory or emotional reasons, and we also recognise that sometimes it is easy to mistake one for another. Following the Regulate, Relate and Reasoning (3Rs) approach to working with children our first goal for every student is to help them find regulation within the spaces where we would like them to learn. This may start with checking in on their sensory needs if they have the language to discuss these and with modelling from our team of their sensory experiences of the space to demonstrate as well as explain that it is ok if your experience of the noise or smell or light in the space is not the same as mine and that we can change lots of things to help us feel comfortable. With emotional regulation, introducing sensory and brain breaks and calming techniques through co-regulation are really important, as well as the open plan space offering fantastic opportunities to benefit from seeing other students at different points in their journey openly using various techniques with confidence.

Our team has grown as our setting has gained more students but consistency of approach and attitude is vital to building trust. Key is the attitude of our team towards the children and each other, to provide the supportive environment to start these journeys. Co-working behaviour and support are openly modelled between the tutors and mentors as well as between the students to help establish this as a normal part of life. Students can be offered a small team if that is what they need, but ideally they are familiar with multiple team members to help provide them with consistency and access in times of staff absence, but also to help them move towards a more traditional pattern of working where they might have a team with subject specific teachers to help them meet their academic goals.

Only when students can regulate in the space and have a trusting relationship with the team they meet can they learn. By building those foundations, students can recognise that everyone here is on individual journeys but we have shared direction towards a fruitful adult life and we can all contribute to both our own journeys and those of the people around us. We emphasise strong co-worker behaviours even for students who are working one to one with a mentor, so behaviours in setting become embedded and can be generalised as good behaviours in any learning or work space.

We also refer to an approach called “The Resilience Ball” by an educational Psychologist called Dr Cath Lowther. The idea of shared direction and a sense of purpose outlined above are two of the four strands of this approach. Next comes a sense of mastery, which in our setting means celebrating what our young people can do well and feel are secure skills. Having opportunities to demonstrate these allow the young people to be celebrated amongst their peers and build a sense of self in the space as a successful person. These skills might well fall outside the curriculum of most schools, but creating a sense of success around a student is very important to them being able to accept challenge. The final strand of this approach is to make sure challenge is appropriately levelled and scaffolded. This is why every young person, whether working towards early years goals or GCSEs have an individualised path that teaches to their preferred learning styles where possible and moves recognising their barriers or skills around transitioning between tasks, recording techniques, executive function and concentration and focus among other variables.

Children and young people in our setting are often extremely vulnerable. Many are disabled, suffer from mental health problems or have experienced adverse childhood events. Some are outside of other safeguarding pathways and we are their most regular contact with a setting. As such we take our safeguarding responsibilities very seriously and provide regular ongoing professional development to make sure our team fully understand their role in keeping children safe. We work closely with school and LAs to make sure our children’s vulnerabilities are recognised if they require additional support outside of setting and collaborate closely with other professionals in the young people’s lives. More broadly, PHSE is covered in context and to an appropriate depth as needed and with discussion with the commissioner of the students education- either school, LA or parent. Team members trained in counselling skills are available and Educational Therapists are used to tackle deep rooted vulnerabilities and concerns. Next year we are adding ELSA training for our team and further mental health training.

We follow Safer Recruitment in Education protocols and as such this role will require a DBS check or application, including checking of barring lists and references from a recent employer and an additional reference from another professional source.