2.2 Working in a special school

Parkside School is basically, it's a complex needs school for children from the ages of 7 to 8 all the way up to 18. We have currently enrolled, we have 166 students on roll at the moment. And they have a whole range of different needs. So we have some students with autism. We have children with global developmental delay. We have children with Down syndrome. We have some children with fragile chromosome syndromes as well. So a real mixture of different students that we have.

They tend to come here after being in a mainstream setting. So we have two different intakes. We have students that come in from year 3. And we have students that come in from year 7. And occasionally, if we go to panel with it, we'll have students that are coming in year 9 and 10 as well.

So they tend to come to us as a result of the fact that they have not coped well in the mainstream environment. Maybe they've had just a one-to-one teaching assistant and they've been kind of segregated from the rest of the class, or their behaviour has not been manageable within a class setting of 30-plus students. And they tend to come to us with quite low sort of confidence. Often they've been excluded or they've been on a managed move. And they tend to stay with us all the way up through to 16, and some of them up to 18. So yeah, lots and lots of different types of student.

It's my personal opinion that in mainstream they've basically been bottom of the rung. Through the entire time that they've been there, they have been segregated. Often children with really high behavioural needs will be one-to-one with a TA in a mainstream school. And here, you see them start to open up and feel capable and feel like they can do things independently.

And we've had some real amazing stories. We had a young man who now he's got his driving licence. He's actually working as a teaching assistant in a neighbouring school. And I don't think that would have happened for him if he'd have been-- I think he would have been swallowed up in the mainstream environment. Whereas here, we can kind of nurture those skills and their interests as well.

We can base lessons around specific interests, because we can create bespoke curricula that are fully encompassing of the things that our students need. And as a result of that, I think we get huge progressmade actually. And confidence, you see their efficacy sort of rise as they go through the school. We can see them starting to realise, oh, no, I can do this. I am good at this. And that's a really wonderful feeling.