Topic cycle
Alongside the Key Skills, Langside School has a series of topics to focus on in its classes throughout the year.
Monitoring of the curriculum
Each of the five Key Skill Areas has a teacher assigned to act as a Key Skill Coordinator. These Coordinators oversee their assigned areas and produce annual Key Skill Development Plans, which are submitted to management and available to the Governing Body. Each Coordinator will lead a teacher meeting focusing on their Key Skill Area in the course of each year.
Termly progress meetings take place, in which class teachers meet with the deputy head teacher to discuss whether each individual student is making good progress. Reports from these meetings refer to numbers of targets achieved and any apparent obstacles to progress, such as problems with medical wellbeing, engagement with learning activities, etc. Where a student is not progressing as well as might be hoped an internal multi-disciplinary meeting will be called to include the teacher, nurse, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, speech and language therapist, and any 1:1 worker assigned to the relevant student. Any strategies to assist the student’s learning will be recorded as action points and parents, carers or external agencies will be consulted where this is judged as potentially beneficial.
Internal moderation meeting
Each term teachers will participate in an internal moderation meeting, in which they examine the evidence for skills achieved by pupils in other classes. The aim is to arrive at agreed criteria for acknowledging achievement and to standardise accepted levels of evidence. Management will also make periodic investigation of class records and evidence bases supporting target achievement in one of the five Key Skill Areas.
External moderation visit
Each term there will be an external moderation visit by a representative from a local special school (probably a deputy head teacher). The visitor will inspect the evidence supporting the achievements of one pupil, discuss methods used with the relevant teacher and meet the specified student. The schools work together in three sets of pairs over a year as follows:
A school representative (teacher) also attends periodic meetings involving other local special schools and focusing on the teaching of mathematics and English (cognition and communication at Langside). This includes some scrutiny of teaching and assessment systems operating in each school.
Class 1 works within the guidelines of the Early Years framework with the support of the Poole Early Years Advisor. This includes an annual moderation process in keeping with oversight applied to other schools within the Early Years networks. The Early Years Advisor has carefully examined the suitability of ImPACTS as a tool for assessing young children with complex needs and judged the system as an effective assessment tool for the purposes of the Early Years framework.
OPTIONS, the post-16 provision in Langside School, carries out activities in the community.
Click here to find out more about the Curriculum Key Skills.
Click here to find out more about the Curriculum Information.