Sitting through another teaching conference and the same questions come up for the keynote speaker: “How do schools provide for children beyond the curriculum to support them socially, emotionally and mentally?”
I sit in these conferences and feel like I have imposter syndrome because I believe that our school does this well.
Five years ago, I walked into Sir Alexander Fleming in Telford and was shown to my “desk” in an office of four designated safeguarding leads in what is now our “Rainbow Room”. I was an aspiring SENCO, taking over the reins.
My imposter syndrome eased somewhat when Sir Alexander Fleming was named Primary Provision of the Year in the 2023 Nasen Awards. So what is it that I think makes our provision effective? Well, it is a tale of five rooms...
Patch
Our nurture provision is themed around a farm worker who lives and nurtures vegetables and baby animals.
In Patch we offer areas such as role play, reading corners, and sensory areas with the aim to help pupils develop their resilience and independence while building a sense of achievement and growing relationships and friendships within the school community. Children get involved in outdoor learning sessions and PE sessions with their class too.
What’s more, Patch is not just here to serve our children. We recently supported two children with complex needs while the local authority found specialist provision places. We always change and adapt to the needs of our children. There is not one year when Patch looks the same as the last.
The Den
In The Den we offer a safe, calm and nurturing space to give our children the coping strategies to move onto the next step, whatever that may be. The Den caters for children in key stage 2 and is run by a nurture lead and assistant.
Each child has four sessions a week in The Den. The children that come in the morning will carry on with their curriculum-based work, but in a smaller and quieter environment with the sessions supporting those who may be falling behind in their work as well as those who may need stretching academically too.
The children in the morning are offered a social breakfast, where they work together to make their own breakfast, supporting independence while learning about kitchen safety and hygiene.
Those that come to The Den in the afternoon, who would have already completed their core subject work in the morning, take part in curriculum-based activities. For example, this term we are learning about Victorian times and so the children have designed their own gown for Queen Victoria, baked Victoria sponge cakes, and used charcoal to draw a traction engine.
Children also get to pick a game for us all to play. This encourages the child to decide independently. I love it when we play set games. I think they are extremely beneficial as it teaches children about winning and losing and how we should cope in each scenario.
The Hive
The Hive is our SEND classroom base for children who are working significantly below their peers. Children who work in here will either have an Education, Health, and Care Plan (EHCP) or high needs funding from the local authority.
We have a full-time qualified and experienced teacher and a teaching assistant who is experienced in working with children with speech and language difficulties, advanced drawing, and who is ELSA-trained (emotional literacy support assistant).
The room can fit up to 10 children and we work on building their independence and confidence of having a go at work that is suitably adapted to their academic ability.
In the morning Hive sessions, we teach English, maths, reading and phonics along with any recommendations from the child’s learning support advisory teacher reports, such as non-verbal reasoning skills, and targets on their EHCPs. The children return to their classrooms in the afternoons where they take part in adapted foundation subjects.
In the afternoons, the Hive turns into a targeted intervention room for groups that are finding areas of the curriculum challenging but can still access their own year group’s work in the mornings. Here we provide pre-teaching or post-teaching to secure understanding.
Some may say that having a class of 10 children would be amazing. It is certainly challenging, rewarding and exhausting all at the same time and most days feels like a class of 30.
TLC
Our TLC room is somewhere our children love visiting, even if they have never had a session there. It is run by our inclusion support assistant who has a first-class degree in psychology and is currently training as a psychotherapist – we are very lucky to have her.
She runs different sessions such as Lego therapy, sand therapy and interventions that teach skills for anger management, communication of emotions, and other interventions that are aimed primarily at improving the inclusion of children with challenging behaviour or personal concerns.
Here we can support children who have difficulties in forming relationships and children with autism by teaching friendship skills and running activities that are designed to help them understand and manage anxiety.
We always use a relatable story that explains anxiety in an age-appropriate manner, allowing children to grasp how it impacts their lives and offering practical tools and strategies to empower children in handling anxiety effectively, promoting relaxation, positive thinking, and problem-solving skills.
This is not an exhaustive list either. Our weekly inclusion meetings with the attendance and senior leadership teams may also highlight something that we could offer that is better suited to the needs of the child to support them in our school to have a successful and happy journey.
And if children aren’t quite ready to take part in these interventions, if they are too dysregulated, they can use our calm room space that also turns into a soft playroom should we need it.
And I can’t forget two members of staff that our children absolutely adore – Bella and her little sister Honey, our dogs!
Rainbow Room
You may think our rainbow room is just that, a brightly coloured room, but it is so much more. The room itself provides a space for children to reflect, read a book, have an informal chat with a member of staff, or offers somewhere to retreat to should a busy, stimulating classroom become too much.
Outside of the four walls, it is a walking bus/minibus service helping children to get to school together with a team of staff supporting children and their families with securing school places and signposting to external agencies that offer housing and food crisis support.
Our headteacher even visits our local Aldi to collect surplus food which is placed outside the school for all to benefit from.
You may ask: how are we able to provide all this – how is this funded? Initially, we started with a Fairshare funding grant from our local authority. We have also applied to education charities for donations and we’re always looking on social media for donations of equipment – we managed to get some tables, chairs and soft furnishings from a local charity that were surplus to their requirements. We also have a very innovative and creative business manager who loves a fundraising event!
Final thoughts
All of our staff and children work hard to make sure that we follow our school values in all that we do.
- Safe: Keeping ourselves and others safe in school and the community.
- Respect: Having the nurturing skills to respect ourselves and families.
- Brave: Overcoming barriers and difficult challenges.
- Pride: Proud of what we achieve.
- Success: Achieving high standards and believing that anything is possible.
- Lisa Pigg is assistant headteacher, inclusion team leader (SENDCO), deputy designated safeguarding lead, and EAL lead at Sir Alexander Fleming Primary School in Telford. Sir Alexander Fleming won the Primary Provision of the Year award at the 2023 Nasen Awards. For more information on the awards, visit https://nasen.org.uk/awards
Headteacher Update Spring Term Edition 2024
This article first appeared in Headteacher Update's Spring Term Edition 2024. This edition was sent free of charge to UK primary schools in January. A free-to-access digital edition is also available via www.headteacher-update.com/content/downloads