meeting the needs of young people with difficulties
Headteacher: We’re good at identifying really quite a large range of different groups of children who, for a whole variety of reasons, a Standard Grade curriculum is not going to achieve success for them. Really what we do is we wrap the curriculum around the child; we don’t make the child fit the box, and that takes an enormous amount of energy. It involves maybe 20 or 30 teachers in the school working in small groups to devise the best curriculum for whatever the group of children is that they’re focusing on. It will involve finding additional funding - which we do. We’ve been successful in an ASF grant and we’re now working to get additional funding from the Lottery project...
Teacher: We’ve been involved in lots of amended curriculum and really our whole focus is 'what does the child need?', 'what are the needs of the child?' We have some pupils that are involved in life skills, working with support assistants, and reducing their Standard Grades right down to maybe about five Standard Grades if that’s what that child needs. We try to use other programmes, like DJ workshops to try and boost self-esteem... to teach them DJing skills! They do learn something from that, and then they showcase that.
For some of them, it is related to how they interact socially, and that they’re going to struggle moving to the next stage in their life in terms of work. So we track them all as individuals and not every child is successful - they don’t all fit into wee boxes and we can tick every box and say they’ve done really, really well. For many of them, to have been here, to have sat their Standard Grades, to have something to offer to an employer, to have fabulous work experience reports - we have youngsters who have been taken on who we wouldn’t really have said that they would move on to employment, but they’ve had their work experience, they’ve done well in it and the person had said 'I’m going to offer you a job at the end of this.' The whole purpose of what we’re trying to do was to develop self-esteem; to give the pupils the idea that, as they move onto the next stage in their lives, they’re prepared to give them real skills for work; and that’s where the work experience - part of it - came in. Also, we suffer from a lot of children who have very low self-esteem and therefore to try and motivate them to want to learn, but also maybe taking their learning onto the next stage, and many of them move onto college from that.
Headteacher: It involves being tremendously imaginative, really getting our lateral thinking antennae out - involving the children and their parents into what they feel would help them to really catch that spark of enthusiasm and be motivated to really achieve at the end of the day.
- Posted on 13 February 2009.