After a lovely holiday, on Monday and Tuesday this week the staff have returned to school to plan for our pupils’ return on Wednesday. As well as preparing lessons and resources, staff have been taking part in a wide range of professional development activities, including training and curriculum development. Some staff have been training in Team Teach, which is an ethos around how we support our children to develop and manage their behaviours., while others have been learning about safer manual handling of children so that they can physically support our children with their physical and care needs.
Today the whole school came together to talk about the exciting curriculum development work that began last term, where we are ensuring that the Newfield curriculum is personalised and exciting, whilst meeting the needs of all of our children who have such varied abilities and needs. It is very important to us that we are clear about our intent for our children and we have continued work this afternoon on this, along with beginning to consider how we implement our curriculum to offer a vibrant learning offer to all children and young people.
Our support staff have been taking part in workshops on a range of areas dependent on the learners that they work with - in the school for Autism they had sessions on Autism Awareness and Autism Communication Approaches, whilst in the SEND school the carousel of workshops focussed on supporting learners with PMLD, Postural Management and Readiness to Learn and Intensive Interaction.
The staff were very engaged and thoroughly enjoyed all of the sessions which were delivered by some of our very experienced, enthusiastic team of HLTAs and teachers. In the photos you can see everyone listening intently, but as well as this there were lots of opportunities to experience practical aspects and some staff relished having a go in the standing frames and therapy equipment to see how that feels for our children!
We were also very fortunate to have our school nursing team in for the 2 days, where they set up a stall and were able to talk to staff about how they can be more involved in delivering health aspects of the curriculum, as well as staff having chance to ‘have a go’ and explore some of the equipment that they may use or see being used around school. The nurses also presented to the whole school to talk about their ‘Pledge’ to us and what they do to support our children, their families and the school staff to make sure our children are happy, healthy and ready to learn!
Thanks to all of the trainers, presenters and staff for making the developments days so successful and making such good use of the precious time.
We love having our children in school, but it is really good to have some time to focus on our own development so that we can ensure the very best standard of education and care for our very special learners - we can’t wait to have them back in school tomorrow for a very Happy Newfield New Year!
