Reach out – The Valley School Way
Different 4 Different

Supporting in our Locality

FAO Headteachers and SENCOs

We are delighted to offer creative support to secondary schools in Stevenage and North Herts. We want to ensure that we can add our skills and knowledge to yours, so that we can work together to meet the needs of our young people with a range of Learning Differences.

Our priorities:
⦁ Ensuring that staff in local schools are guided well and know how to access resources and ideas that may help learners
⦁ Ensuring that all advice and support is given with sensitivity and from an informed and experienced member of our staff, who has worked in schools like yours and understands your context

We are happy to offer a bespoke support programme for individual students which will include:

⦁ Observations of a student in class
⦁ Support with adapting the curriculum to meet the individual students needs
⦁ Advice and strategies
⦁ Support for creating an effective individual learning portrait (ILP), that offers your staff practical and simple advice on how to meet the needs
⦁ Sharing or creating resources appropriate to individual students
⦁ Help to identify priority next steps for learning.
⦁ Advice on the learning environment
⦁ Range of pastoral support – building relationships and providing a student voice
⦁ Visits to The Valley School to spend time in a classroom & look at resources

We would also be happy to support other schools develop their understanding of how to support student needs through whole school or designated group training. We are happy to respond to your own requests, but the sorts of topics we could offer are:

⦁ Understanding how to respond to a variety of conditions
⦁ Creating an inclusive environment
⦁ Doing “different for different” in a mainstream context
⦁ Creating ILPs that work
⦁ Preparing your classroom to make it work for all students
⦁ The role of the SENCO
⦁ Preparing for formal assessment

This service is free of charge so if you think we can help in any way, please email graham.hawkins@thevalley.herts.sch.uk

“Individual Learning Portraits are relevant, succinct documents that reflect the student’s input and are written in the first person. These documents give an immediate overview of a student’s main needs and allow intervention to be supportive from the outset. The review team judge these documents to be a particular strength of the school and to reflect the underlying positive approach that exists to accepting students’ needs and supporting their learning and development.”

National Autism Society Inspection Team