Our School Ethos and Aims

Our aim is to CREATE a happy, healthy community in which we can all succeed. 

Our curriculum and provision intends to help support our pupils to become:

Confident

Resilient

Emotionally literate

Ambitious

Tolerant and respectful of each other and

Effective communicators. 

 We have adopted a trauma informed approach to best support our pupils in all aspects of their school lives. Two staff members have recently successfully completed the Trauma Informed Schools Diploma and all staff have completed  a one day training course to better inform them. Through this approach we aim to:

• Respond effectively to our vulnerable pupils and those who have suffered a trauma or have a mental health issue.
• Develop an understanding of the long-term impact of specific adverse childhood experiences and how to enable our pupils to work through their feelings
•  Know how to respond to children who are in distress in ways that help them to emotionally regulate, feel psychologically safe and develop the capacity to handle stress well over time
•  Work to increase the protective factors and ‘safety cues’ in the school culture to prevent adverse childhood experiences from becoming long-term mental, physical and societal health problems.

Through our wellbeing team, school staff are trained to be emotionally available in the ways they relate to our pupils and to deliver interventions specifically designed to support them. We need to understand how to help our pupils make sense of what has happened to them. To this end we intend to:

• Learn to relate to our pupils in ways that alleviate their suffering, support their learning and make them feel cared for and appreciated
• Learn how to relate with our pupils in ways that enhance their self-esteem, confidence and feelings of psychological safety.
• Know how to listen and empathise when our pupils want to talk about painful issues and help them reflect and resolve
• Develop an in-depth understanding of what it’s like for our pupils to suffer from specific mental health problem (e.g. depression/ anxiety) and feel confident in offering them accurate empathy, understanding and key psycho-education without inferring meaning
• Employ strategies for early intervention (early indicators of mental health difficulties), know our limits of competence and refer on to other agencies, when these are available.