LEAP Primary Provision - Off-site Placement and Assessment

LEAP Primary Curriculum Statement

 

LEAP Primary School, Short Stay Unit and Assessment Centre is a new provision for children who may be either permanently excluded (PEx), suspended, or in need of early help.  We have two curriculum pathways, depending on whether our children are with us full time or part time, but all of our provision is child-centred and is delivered with a calm nurturing attitude as a key focus. Many children who come to us have become disengaged with education or have experienced a breakdown in relationship with their educational setting. Often, our children will have experienced trauma and find self-regulation difficult. Therefore, we prioritise our children’s wellbeing, along with their personal and social development.

 

Our long-term aim is to offer a completely therapeutic curriculum and to support this, we are currently growing a therapeutic team of teachers, learning support assistants and therapists and trialling the trauma informed approach Beacon House Modules. In the meanwhile, due to having to open our service quickly in order to meet the demands of the local authority, we have chosen to use some of the popular published schemes which are grounded in evidence- based academic approaches; White Rose (Science and Maths), Coram SCARF (PSHE), The Literacy Tree (English), Read Write Inc (Systematic Synthetic Phonic Programme) and Beacon House (psychodynamic learning). We use these published schemes and their assessment tools to identify and address the learning gaps. We recognise in our curriculum design that progress is not always linear and these published schemes allow us at LEAP to personalise the sequencing of learning and/or follow the identified progression of skills and knowledge with fidelity. All pupils have daily phonics (Read, Write, Inc) or guided reading sessions. We aim to encourage a love of reading and so reading is embedded throughout our curriculum and within our daily routine. Our developing therapeutic curriculum which we are currently trialling and adapting uses material from the Beacon House Survival Animals program, which is designed to explain the brain’s response to (real and perceived) threat. Once our curriculum is established it is our aim that future children will learn to understand how the brain responds to threat using fight, flight, freeze; they will learn to identify what their physiological response to threat is and to identify strategies that they know will work to help them to regulate. Children will need varying degrees of support to achieve this. The Level Up intervention has been designed by our NHS speech and language therapist to support regulation and correlates with our developing Survival Animals lesson plans. Once Level Up is fully embedded across the curriculum, children and staff will be able to understand the importance of regulating energy levels for different activities throughout the day.

 

Both our inclusive curriculum pathways are further supplemented by incorporated elements of subjects such as DT - cooking, and PSHE and the Language for Thinking intervention. Additionally, we offer a growing variety of enrichment activities on different days including swimming, sit-down kayaking, wall climbing; museum, shop, library and café visits.

 

 We work at a stage not age level so as to enable children with special educational needs to access learning which is both right for them and prepares them for the next step in their educational journey.

 

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LEAP Primary Assessment Centre Cohort timetable

 

LEAP Primary Full Time Cohort timetable