The Way We Work.

Statement of Purpose

Every teacher comes to school everyday to change the lives of the children in our care. We accomplish this through expert therapies, inspired teaching, and unswerving commitment to the intellectual and emotional development of the child.

Our aim is to meet each student’s unique developmental, behavioural, and emotional needs as well as help develop his or her cognitive abilities through the development of a firm foundation of skills.

We are a school for mild to moderate, sometimes complex needs for children between the ages of 4 and 11.

We have a broad, balanced, and coherent curricula informed by our therapists.

The teachers and therapists work as an integrated team. Therapists work within the classrooms and conduct small group sessions of therapy for all the children, everyday. There are 4 speech and language therapists and 3 occupational therapists assessing and team-planning for every student.  In our planning and teaching, we take a developmental approach, going beyond basic academic skills and looking at the fundamental abilities on which are built thinking skills and problem solving.

Once each week all staff and therapists who make up the Pastoral Teams, meet to discuss every student, these discussions are documented in 6 key focus areas; behavioural challenges, mental health, physical health, home life, academic progress, and communication skills. Each of these areas is rag rated through input by all staff and any needed actions are determined. All documents for each child, currently enrolled in Chelsea Group, are stored securely online which enables teaching staff to refer to information on individual children from the beginning of their enrolment at CGC. These documents include, Pupil Profiles,Risk Assessments, Behaviour Profiles, IEPs, Annual Reports, Therapy Assessment Reports, Weekly Homelink Highlights, the CGC Planning and Progress Tool.

The Environment

Our building and the furnishings are unexpected for a special needs school. We intentionally make the interior as home-like as possible to reassure those children who have failed in other academic settings, which is the case with most of our students. Failure is experienced even in nursery school and the association with the classroom is not positive for those children who feel diminished by their academic, developmental and/or social challenges in the typical school environment. We feel the strategies for coping with sensory aversions, poor attention, poor interactions with peers, etc., should be developed in a non-clinical environment to enable the child to generalise these skills.

Class Groups

The students are divided into seven class groups, each with a maximum of 6 children, according to their needs, not ages. Behaviour, attention span, learning style, communication modality and needs, sensory profile, social interaction, academic, social emotional wellbeing and other SaLT and OT needs are considered when creating all class groups.  These groups are taught based on an individual and child centred approach, building a teaching plan based on the broad profile of the student. This best serves the complex child who cannot be taught using one age level curriculum. 

The lessons are well planned, making the best and most effective use of the school day. The children are not in fixed groups for the year; they are regularly assessed to ensure they are placed within the most appropriate group, meeting their academic, emotional, behavioural and social needs. There is a bi-weekly review of these areas to monitor progress.

Park

In all unstructured periods of the school day, each child’s Therapy IEP highlights the key areas of need and the targets set by staff for that child during those periods. This is especially true for park time where all therapists and teachers and TAs accompany the students to the park to support play skills, communication skills, and motor skills.

Lunch

Students are divided into therapeutic eating groups in which challenges such as oral motor difficulties, fine motor skill difficulties with cutlery and self feeding, sensory issues, and behavioural needs are supported by the therapy and teaching team.

Over the 2 past decades, The Chelsea Group of Children has served organic lunches and snacks, which are wheat and dairy free. All food is prepared in our own kitchen by a professional chef and assistant. We take food and nutrition very seriously and make certain children receive a varied, healthy diet every school day.

Planning for each child is thorough and accessible to all teaching staff.

Planning is appropriate and individualised for each child and for each small group of children. We have devised a Planning and Progress Tool for every student, which is available to staff on our file sharing facility on school computers. The teachers and therapists work together to create an individual education plan (IEP) for each child which is reflected in all planning and tracking documentation, including mid-term planning, EHCPs, weekly rag rating, provision maps and progress tracking

There is a wide range of resources in each classroom.

Teachers are given a generous budget with which to replenish and update resources and these resources are used effectively in the subject sessions and shared with other teaching staff to insure cross- curricular teaching.

The structure of the lessons is tiered to enable progress.

For example all the Vygotsky modules are built in developmental and academic progression. Each lesson builds on the one before and supports the next lesson. These lessons are not taken randomly off the shelf. The structure of our teaching modules ensure any absence from a lesson or lessons through one-to-one therapy sessions/assessments or illness does not hamper the student’s progress through missing a key lesson in the progression of lessons.

Expertise in managing behaviour at Chelsea Group.
 

Challenging behaviours are often the remnants of the trauma of a child’s failure in a mainstream setting. Many children have learned disruptive behaviour will trigger removal from the classroom and this becomes their goal. Therefore we keep a child in the classroom, supported by staff who follow that student’s Positive Behaviour Plan as long as the other children’s learning is not impaired. This requires a balance between inclusion and exclusion for the benefit of all. Our staff is highly trained and experienced in managing challenging behaviours. We create an atmosphere in which a student can experience success. This enables a child to develop a crucial attribute; self esteem. Children are taught strategies to recognise and control their feelings and behaviour. The Pastoral Team write a unique behavioural plan for each child ensuring consistency in responses to challenging behaviour.

The Use of Technology at Chelsea Group

Every student at Chelsea Group learns to use IPADS and desktop computers. Technology is a beneficial teaching tool, but is never used at Chelsea Group to replace the teacher. The pedagogy of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and its derivative, Floortime, provide compelling evidence of the value and necessity of the adult- child relationship in the cognitive development of a child. 

As a teaching tool the teacher can use technology to support the needs of individual students through the ease of differentiating content and create visuals quickly and easily for individual lessons. Technology can provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding, enabling the teacher to track the student’s progress and make more accurate teaching plans for each child. Whilst one of the benefits of ICT is to eliminate the sensory challenges of  face to face communication, for many of our learners it is also a key goal to enable our students to more effectively engage and interact with other humans. Many of our children have no desire to interact socially with anyone. We use technology in many ways to open the doors to social interaction. For example, the children film and record each other with the IPAD and then reflect on each other’s songs, stories and presentations. They make portraits of one another using computer programs and cameras. 

An IPAD, desktop computer, or interactive whiteboard can not alter the lesson to follow a child’s interest and artfully bring him back from distraction to the preferred topic, nor seize unexpected teaching opportunities when a child displays curiosity or knowledge in a marginal topic. No child strives to please the whiteboard, but when a trusted teaching adult supports and encourages the child, gently coaxing the performance, which is just beyond the child’s established and comfortable ability, real and joyous learning occurs.  This is not to say real and joyous discoveries are not possible through the use of technology, but for the majority of students at Chelsea Group who find it easy to engage with tablet or desktop technology and difficult to engage with people, “care must be taken not to provide an amazing toy with which they can shut out the world.” Susan Cunliffe, CGC SALT.

The Culture

The nurturing atmosphere which enables children to have access to learning with less fear and to develop strategies to cope with their own learning difficulties and sensory challenges, is not merely a by product of a group of carefully selected nice people. The culture has evolved over 22 years of dedicated work by highly trained individuals guided by the best practices available. As a team we represent training from around the world. We maintain the culture, designed and developed to answer the questions What is best for the child? What do we need to do to prepare him/her for the future? through a steadfast adherence to our core principles while at the same time adapting to the changing landscape of regulations and expectations.

University Student Placements

The Chelsea Group of Children provides School Experience Placement for students from universities and academies including the University of Roehampton.  The Head Teacher and the Head of Teaching and Learning have received training at Roehampton as School Based Mentors.

Several other institutions have placed teaching and therapy students in our school.

These include,

University College London

Loughborough University 

University of West Attica, Greece

Canterbury Christ Church University

Greenwich Canterbury

University of East Anglia

King Solomon Academy

Bolingbroke Academy