Learning and Teaching

“The teaching of literacy across the curriculum has been well promoted. Pupils’ independent work in books reflects a strong development of their literacy skills. Your staff promote good use of vocabulary in lessons, which is also reflected in pupils’ work over time.”   OFSTED October 2018

“The quality of teaching has been sustained since the last inspection. Pupils are achieving good outcomes in relation to their starting points.”   OFSTED October 2018

“I witnessed very positive, constructive interactions and relationships between staff and students during this process. These relationships are fundamental to students’ success and are developed through building trust, listening to students and sharing positive experiences with them.” IQM report April 2022

Our approach to Teaching and Learning for all our students has needed to be different to what they have already experienced before being permanently excluded or at the risk of being permanently excluded.

At KSSS we believe that learning should be an enjoyable experience for all our students. Through our teaching we equip students with the skills, knowledge and understanding necessary to be able to make informed choices about important aspects of their lives. We believe that appropriate teaching and learning experiences help our students to lead happy and rewarding lives. In order to support students’ learning, we recognise that children learn in different ways and we understand the need to develop strategies that allow all children to learn effectively – so we must and do have a highly skilled workforce to accomodate and meet their social and academic needs.

Meeting pupils needs

Every pupil is entitled to a positive meaningful learning experience which will be personalised and inclusive

Every pupil at KSSS has the right to receive the highest quality education. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that all their educational needs are met.

Every pupil at KSSS should achieve social and academic success to enable them to move onto the next stage of their education.

Ensuring inclusion involves:

• Setting and explaining suitable differentiated learning challenges
• Responding to pupils diverse learning needs
• Working to overcome potential barriers to learning
• Using personal learning plans to set parameters that ensure pupils feel safe and valued in their environment. This may be in a pastoral or academic sense, inside or outside of the classroom.
• In debriefing sessions and staff training sessions conversations are on going to address the balance between keeping to our agreed structures and making individual reasonable adjustments.

Through our teaching we aim to: 

• Meet the academic needs of our pupils.
• Focus upon the individual needs, talents and interests of our pupils.
• Equip children with the skills necessary to enable them to transfer back to school successfully.
• Enable children to become confident, resourceful, enquiring and independent learners.
• Foster children’s self-esteem and help them build positive relationships with others.
• Develop children’s self-respect and encourage children to respect the ideas, attitudes, values and feelings of others.
• Show respect for all cultures and in so doing, to promote positive attitudes towards other people.
• Enable children to understand their community and help them feel valued as part of the Kettlebrook community.
• Help children to grow into reliable, independent and positive citizens.
• Prepare our pupils for a mainstream learning environment – in order to facilitate reintegration.
• Prepare our pupils for appropriate choices at post 16 and become lifelong learners.

We plan to provide for pupils’ individual educational, social, moral, spiritual and cultural needs as well as addressing their social, emotional and behavioural difficulties.

Our curriculum is broad and balanced and follows the National Curriculum as closely as possible. We recognise that whilst children need lots of routines and structured activities, they also need to refine their social and organisational skills – opportunities for this are planned for in the formal and the ‘hidden curriculum’.

We recognise that due to past histories of extreme social, emotional and behavioural difficulties in school and learning difficulties that subsequently have not been adequately addressed; some children have a deficit of basic academic skills. This is addressed through careful assessment and planning. Staff recognise that certain key areas of literacy and numeracy need to be regularly revisited and reinforced.

Please refer to the CURRICULUM section of the website.