Creating a Life Skills Space Within a School

13th June 2023Website Admin

Creating a Life Skills Space Within a School

Danielle Petar, Emily Bacon, Michal Geller

At Gesher we want our young people to enjoy school. We want them to enjoy learning with one another and supporting each other to succeed. We want them to have great experiences; to love physical and creative activities; to enjoy the unity of a shared faith; to find things in the curriculum that they can be passionate about; to be proud of their exhibitions of work and the real-world projects that make a difference in our community. And, of course, we want them to leave us with the best qualifications possible.

All that having been said, we are a school for young people, many of whom started their school career in a mainstream school which was not well equipped to support them. Parents (and young people as they mature) inevitably have concerns about how well they will cope with the mainstream life of employment and relationships and independent living. This is the world beyond Gesher.

And this is why we have developed a coherent, progressive and continuously evolving life skills curriculum. We are passionate about preparing learners to be assured and adept when they eventually progress from Gesher, as employees, friends, partners and citizens of the world. 

The Gesher Life Skills Space — from top left (clockwise): bed, wardrobe, lounge area, fully functioning kitchen with hot plates, toaster, kettle, microwave, blender, fridge, sink, dining table and chairs, cash register, desk and computer, ironing board and iron, and a ‘my body’ area with a mirror and personal grooming tools.

 

Creating a life skills space within a school

Ask ChatGPT what you need to set up a life skills classroom and you’ll be given a list of eight steps which include finding a space, making a budget and employing a member of staff. Do some of your own research via academic articles and practical textbooks and the same three themes emerge. Sadly, what the AI and the “old-fashioned” research tool don’t take into account is that schools are not generally known for having spare rooms, giant financial budgets, or bonus staff on hand to deliver extra lessons. It can therefore be difficult to know where to start with something like life skills, which generally falls largely outside the traditional curriculum subjects like Maths, English and Science.

In Issue Two of The Bridge, we featured an article about Gesher’s life skills curriculum, so we won’t pretend that we were starting from scratch when we created our life skills classroom space. We knew what our curriculum required by way of facilities. We also won’t pretend that we weren’t lucky enough to have a small space in our school, a modest budget and a skilled member of staff to deliver our sessions. Perhaps we made our own luck!

However, the journey we have travelled puts us in a position to share some of our insights in a practical and accessible way. We are also conscious that, as a result of our own journey, there isn’t a huge amount of practical advice out there for schools wanting to implement and integrate life skills-related learning. We hope this article helps.

Ideally you will find a space, but it can be a shared space.

How we’ve done it

We moved school sites in 2021 and, as such, were in the fortunate position of being able to include in our plans a dedicated space within our building for life skills – in other words, to give it equal claim in the allocation of space, rather than stealing space back from existing use. However, even the room we are currently using is a temporary solution which is shared with our library. (Although, of course, library use is a life skill, too!) To manage this space the room is carefully timetabled to allow for classes to use the library and for classes to use the life skills space. The room is also used for lunchtime clubs and school council meetings, and can be available as an extra learning space.

Things you could try in your setting

Despite the title of this article specifically referring to a space, there is no necessity for life skills to take place in just one place. We could have called it “Creating a life skills mindset”. Areas such as the lunch hall and the staff room (when not being used by staff) are ready-made life skills areas because of the practical and real-world activities that take place in them. The lunch hall, for example, can be used to practise setting the table and preparing food while the staff room is likely to contain a dishwasher, sink, and perhaps even an oven, making it an ideal environment for students to work on kitchen-based skills.

What’s coming next

One of the end goals for the life skills space at Gesher is to have a full-size, self-contained flat which includes a kitchen, bedroom and living area for students to be able to access during their life skills sessions. To do this we are keen to have students’ input to the design and to make it relevant to their interests.

Making good use of the space

How we’ve done it

Our classroom space is set up to emulate elements of a small flat with a kitchen area, a bed and a sofa. Within the room, each item is labelled to support the learning of organisation skills as well as encouraging independence. All of our students use the room once a week for their timetabled life skills lesson. In addition, we have a group of learners (known as our Life Skills Legends) who attend daily life skills sessions in the space. This gives them more time to practise skills and the way the room is laid out also means that skills can be practised in sequence. For example, when doing bedroom-related life skills, students can take the sheets off the bed, wash them in the washing machine, dry them on an airer and then put them back onto the bed.

Things you could try in your setting 

If you don’t have the luxury of having a classroom space where life skills teaching can take place, then an alternative could be to have smaller life skills-related materials stored in one place and accessible to staff. For example, items such as a kettle, a toaster and a blender could be stored relatively easily and used for food preparation skills, while items like hairdryers, straighteners and mirrors could be available for students to practise self-care skills. (We’ve included a full list of resources in the Resources for Schools section of this issue). These materials could then be used for in-school sessions. Activities which require large resources, such as a bed or washing machine, could be completed as part of homework tasks which are developed alongside parents. (It is a feature of our programme that parents are partners – deliverers and accreditors.)

What’s coming next

The next phase would be transferring some of the basic life skills activities into employment-related ones. For example, opening an on-site cafe run by the students would allow for greater independence around their food and drink preparation skills. Other examples are creating an allotment on the grounds, planning and running a school visit, or hosting an employers’ event.

Equipping the space

How we’ve done it

To furnish and equip the life skills rooms, we appealed for donations of furniture from our students’ families and friends, as well as a small amount of financial support from a community donor. Before adding anything to the room we involved parents as well as students to hear their thoughts about what should be included. The clearest piece of feedback that we received from both groups was that the room should be a place where students (as much as possible) could do things independently.

Things you could try in your setting

In the Resources for Schools section at the back of this issue, we have included a shopping list of items that might be useful for life skills sessions. Alongside each item on the list are ideas and suggestions for use. By no means do we have all the answers to these questions, so we would love to hear from you with further creative ideas. You can email us directly via [email protected].

Things that we would like to do…

Moving forward, we would like to incorporate more technology into our life skills sessions. In the first instance, this could involve using online banking and doing an online food shop. However, we would also like eventually to include working with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT which, despite offering a rather generic answer to our opening question, will undoubtedly be a huge part of our students’ lives in the future.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • Is life skills education on the agenda for your students, especially the ones most likely to be challenged by the transition to life beyond school?

  • What ideas in this article have most resonance for you? What ideas does your school have that you could share on an email as suggested above?

  • If life skills is not currently a high priority in your school, who might you need to gather together to read this article (and the one in The Bridge 2) and to discuss possible ways forward?

Reimagining Assessment: Views From an Autistic Young Person

13th June 2023Website Admin

Reimagining Assessment: Views From an Autistic Young Person

Joshua Gross

Since the 1990s, the way we assess young people has been dominated by a culture of public accountability and competition, leading to the unhealthy belief that the grade is everything. The idea is now so important that many exams, like GCSEs and A-Levels are referred to as “high-stakes” tests because of the way they determine the next stage of someone’s life.

Those who create the high-stakes assessments claim that they are the fairest and most rigorous tool we have to demonstrate student achievement. However, the evidence used to back up these claims is often insubstantive (Richardson, 2022). One of the consequences of these high-stakes assessments is that young people’s outcomes are reduced to a number or letter which only reflects a very small proportion of their experiences and achievements at school and usually only in academic subjects.

Whilst this affects all young people, data has shown that, on average, autistic young people do not achieve the same levels of academic success as their non-autistic peers assessed in this way. The most up-to-date government data shows that 64% of non-autistic students achieved a Grade 4 or above in Maths and English, compared to 31% of autistic students – and this data is not a one-off. The same pattern exists in the previous three years’ data. While the statistics alone are striking, even more profound are the hidden stories behind the data. As such, in this piece, we share the reflections and experiences of Joshua, an autistic young person who has the lived experience of feeling let down and misrepresented by the current system and who has vital ideas on how it might be reimagined to prevent the same thing happening to others.

“The big problem with existing assessments is that they are the be all and end all when you leave school.” Joshua

The same idea is expressed in the opening sentence to this article and yet what this means for young people can often get lost in the statistics. For Joshua, who at the time of writing is applying for apprenticeships, the implications are clear.

“I can only put my grades, not the fact that I spent most of my A-Level time suffering through extreme mental health issues and that it was a miracle I even made it to sit the examinations, not the six times I almost dropped out and came back to them later… It becomes really difficult to come out the other side and still be a strong candidate when the only important thing is what grade you got.”

Joshua’s solution to this problem would be for schools to recognise the skills that young people have through a more flexible approach to curriculum and to assessment. In Joshua’s case, he has a talent and passion for computer programming and, while he was able to take this as an A-Level, he was still assessed within the constraints of that curriculum and the conventions of exams.

“In my A-level computer science class we had people who had never opened the Python Editor before and we had people like me who had made full video games in one day before… I would be running off doing these ultra-complex things at home that would never be recognised because they weren’t even remotely related to the curriculum. Like, I can make a video game using languages that the curriculum doesn’t even know exist. And I’m just sitting there doing these things, but none of them get recognition. I can do all this stuff and it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t what I was told I had to do. I didn’t fit that specific guideline and therefore it’s not good enough.”

By having a curriculum that is less constraining, less of a rule book, there would be more scope for teachers to work with young people in their area(s) of interest and strength, aligned with their passions. While this would have benefits for all learners, there would be particular benefits for some autistic young people who often have a special interest or aptitude. Recent research by King’s College London, for example, has shown that when adults are accepted as having a special interest, and where it is responded to positively, recognised and valued, this can lead to them excelling in the linked curriculum area (Wood, 2021).

As not all neurodiverse young people will have a special interest that can be assessed within school, it is also worth considering other ways in which a more flexible assessment process would be beneficial. Here, Joshua has further important ideas to share.

“Assessment as it is now is not actually really a test of knowledge, but more a test of memory. I found often that those kinds of assessments really did not work for me, but one that I really excelled in were the two B-techs that I took in Business and Digital Media. Instead of having this one assessment that you’re building up to and studying in unhealthy ways for, you’re working on it throughout the entire course. It’s not one giant thing, it’s a bunch of smaller things. Break one big problem down into a bunch of smaller ones, and suddenly it becomes less of a big problem.”

Joshua’s views about coursework are echoed in the academic literature, which has shown the pedagogical benefits of such forms of assessment, as well as the fact that students prefer it to exams (Richardson, 2015). Despite this, under the current assessment system in England, none of the Maths, English or Science GCSEs have a coursework component which counts towards a student’s final grade. As such, the work that a student does across two or three years of study is condensed and assessed through a few hours of exams. This in turn then shapes their future opportunities. Joshua considers this system to be a particular challenge for autistic young people as “Often the pressures of the school system can break a student so easily and so quickly. And it becomes really difficult to come out the other side and still be a strong candidate when the only important thing is what grade you got.”

There are two more things that we know about the lack of fit between the current assessment system and neurodiversity. One was well articulated by Joshua: “If you emphasise ‘standards’ and ‘standardisation’, then by definition this will not work for autistic young people who are, by definition, non-standard.” The other, which is linked, relates to the idea of “spiky profiles”. Autistic learners are less standardised, less conventional – they have great strengths alongside different challenges. An assessment model that emphasises the challenges (e.g. writing essays) and minimises the strengths and passions (e.g. technical capability, creativity) will serve both autistic youngsters and the system badly.    

Endnote

Joshua’s views are those of just one student, but the dearth of autistic voices in both the academic and non-academic literature in this field makes this a provocative contribution and one that we hope is built on by further activity in this area.

References

Richardson, J. T. (2015). Coursework versus examinations in end-of-module assessment: a literature review. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 40(3), 439-455.

Richardson, M. (2022). Rebuilding Public Confidence in Educational Assessment. UCL Press.

Wood, R. (2021). Autism, intense interests and support in school: From wasted efforts to shared understandings. Educational Review, 73(1), 34-54.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • What rings true for you in Joshua’s comments?

  • You will almost certainly have neurodiverse learners in your school. Might a small piece of research or a focus group with them help to unearth challenges they face to which you could respond?

Three Big Ideas for Assessment for Schools Hoping to Do Better

13th June 2023Website Admin

Three Big Ideas for Assessment for Schools Hoping to Do Better

Julie Temperley

1. Agree together the outcomes you value most for your learners (the knowledge, skills, values and characteristics). Which of these do you currently assess well?

Some things to try:

Run a whole school enquiry to surface what learning teachers, learners, families, and the wider community consider most important to be able to assess or demonstrate. Knowledge is sure to feature, but so too will skills like problem-solving, and characteristics like confidence and kindness.

Explore together how much time is spent in school on assessing learning that is not congruent with the things that you value.  Do you have the balance right?

Co-design with staff, students and stakeholders a learning dashboard that teachers and learners can complete together to track and communicate progress in knowledge, skills and characteristics important to everyone in the school and beyond.

2. Expand the range of assessment tools and methods used in school and grow teachers’ confidence and capability in their use.

Some things to try:

Group assessment – instead of awarding individual marks, teachers and learners agree assessment criteria for group work and, on completion, the whole group gets the same mark. This approach is especially useful in project-based learning, but can be applied to any group-work activity, and encourages the development of skills for collaboration, teamwork and shared responsibility.

Routinely include an element of self-assessment – learners use the same criteria as teachers to “mark” their work, then teachers and learners discuss the differences between their assessments and what might sit behind these.

Mastery learning – learners explore success criteria at the beginning of a unit of learning (perhaps using “exemplar work”) and make as many attempts at some or all of the assessments as they need to, in order to identify gaps in their knowledge and skills. They can then seek help from their peers, teacher or other resources to address the gaps. Learners do not move onto the next unit of learning until they are confident they have mastery and can pass the assessment.

A variation of mastery learning is repeating assessments but with reduced support, where success becomes a learner being able to complete similar tasks over time with an increasing degree of independence.

3. Engage a wider range of people and perspectives in assessment, including learners and their families – and ensure that teachers are all “assessment literate” to lead this.

Some things to try:

Co-design of assessment rubrics and criteria charts – teachers and learners work together to design a rubric that describes success criteria and sets out what good looks like. Rubrics like this are often co-designed on the basis of shared examination of an exemplary piece of work, identifying and agreeing what makes it so good. Rubrics promote learner agency and empowerment by giving learners a sense of control over their learning and how they are being assessed.

Learner portfolios – portfolios and learning passports record learning in a variety of ways, for instance using narrative and photographs and annotated copies of learners’ work to give a clear and detailed perspective on what the learner has achieved and why this is important to them. Recently, digital tools have expanded the range of evidence and examples that can be collected in a portfolio, to include video, audio and presentations, for instance.

Exhibitions of learning – there is a long history of exhibition or performance as a means of making achievement visible and assessing it. Art exhibitions, drama or music performances, sport, chess tournaments – there are multiple examples. More significantly, there are examples in the UK and around the world of schools where exhibition and learner portfolios are the principal forms of assessment.   

Final word

There is, of course, much more that we could add to this – and much more was contained in the Critical Friendship Group conversation from which this article was drawn. What all the suggestions have in common, though, is that they are driving towards assessment processes that facilitate growth, the exploration of oneself, deeper learning and self-worth. They are about creating – for all learners – hope for the future.

Acknowledgements

This article has been developed by drawing on contributions made in a Gesher School Critical Friendship Group by generous friends and colleagues who are expert in assessment and/or neurodiversity. They are:

Dr Amelia Peterson (London Interdisciplinary School)

Alison Woosey (Bolton Impact Trust)

David McVeigh (Head of Assessment Design at Pearson UK)

Kelly Sanders (Former USA school principal; consultant)

Joe Pardoe (School 21 and Big Education)

Joshua Gross (a neurodivergent school-experienced young person)

Anne-Marie Twumasi (Big Change)

We would like to take this opportunity to offer our sincere thanks for the time, energy and insight that each of our critical friends brought. Your advice and ideas are already making a difference.

Why is School a Tough Place for Neurodiverse Children?

15th December 2022Website Admin

Why is School a Tough Place for Neurodiverse Children?

Ali Durban

A Short Reflection on Bravery

If all schools were judged by the provision they make for their most vulnerable learners (which feels not to be an unreasonable measure) it could be that there would be more “inadequate” judgements than there are currently. For some learners attendance at school requires reserves of courage.

Bravery is not a word that we would want to define any child or young person’s daily experience of school. After all, school is meant to be a place of safety, fulfilment, and positive relationships, yet for thousands of differently abled children and young people, navigating their normal school day is challenging, complex, damaging even, and bravery is a daily necessity of survival. In his recent book ‘The Inclusion Illusion’, Dr Rob Webster highlights the everyday experience of students with SEND in mainstream school as being characterised by separation and segregation.

School is meant to be a place of safety, fulfilment, and positive relationships, yet for thousands of differently abled children and young people, navigating their normal school day is challenging, complex, damaging even.

‘There are structures and processes ingrained within these settings that serve to exclude and marginalise them (children and young people). The arrangements that led to this might be defendable if they were necessary for creating an effective pedagogical experience. Yet the evidence… suggests that, if anything, they result in a less effective pedagogical experience.’

The Policy Context

Over 1.4 million children in Britain are reported to have some sort of special educational need and we all know that the unassessed number is probably much larger. Three-quarters of these (about 1.1 million) are on SEND support and 365,000 have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP). The current SEND Green Paper talks about ‘a clear vision for a more inclusive system’ but gives no real sense of how it will be achieved. To put this inclusive thinking into context, following a consultation on behaviour management policies and exclusion, the Department for Education appointed a “behaviour tsar” to create “behaviour hubs”. Guidance also referred to the use of “removal rooms” in schools as a punishment and to the use of managed moves as an early intervention measure for pupils at risk of exclusion. To be clear, the children and young people most impacted by these measures are the most vulnerable in society. Mostly they are those with SEND.

The Government (and constant merry-go-round of Education Ministers) continues to wrestle with inclusion and SEND system reform, with no clear approach to system transformation in sight. For this article, we set aside the complexities of system change and instead take a grassroots-level deep dive into exactly why life in mainstream education is so tough for differently abled students.

Introduction

Gesher’s Ashleigh Wolinsky, Speech and Language Therapist, and Ingrid Mitchell, Educational Psychologist, have extensive experience working with SEND learners. We asked them to share some insights drawn from that professional experience. It will not be a shock to readers to learn that SEND identification, poor resources, and assessment and diagnosis delays are some of the consistent features.

However, with that as background we have extracted from the interviews three further clusters of issues:

  1. Those that are endemic to ‘school’ — the way secondary school in particular works.
  2. Issues that are unique to the learner — the needs of a ‘differently able’ youngster.
  3. What we have called ‘wisdoms’ — some practical suggestions that may be of help.

End Note: This article is not a criticism of mainstream schools, nor of secondary schools in particular.  Nor is it a eulogy for special school provision. Let’s be clear: we believe that both mainstream schools and special schools can do a great job for neurodiverse SEND youngsters — hence the insights and advice.

What we are also clear about, though, is that hundreds of young people across the country have a potentially damaging and unhappy experience of school and that there is knowledge about how things could be better. This piece is a small contribution to that, drawn from those with expertise.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • What most challenges your school’s SEND practices in this article?

  • Are there things in the ‘practical wisdoms’ section that your school might like to adopt?

  • Might it be of value to your school to create a Learners’ Lens of insights from your neurodiverse children?

How can a Life Skills Curriculum Support Children to Access Learning?

15th December 2022Website Admin

How can a Life Skills Curriculum Support Children to Access Learning?

Danielle Petar

‘More than just practising daily tasks…’ Gesher’s new life skills scheme

The idea of teaching life skills in schools as part of a young person’s education has been formalised since the late 1990s when the World Health Organisation (WHO) introduced its ten core life skills principles. They defined life skills as ‘a group of psychosocial competencies and interpersonal skills that help people make informed decisions, solve problems, think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, build healthy relationships, empathise with others, and cope with and manage their lives in a healthy and productive manner’. Before that, it was a core mission of the scouting movement (since the 1920s) and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (founded in 1956). We have long known that life skills are an essential thing to have. For specialist schools like Gesher, they are crucial to school success, future life chances and emotional well-being.

Despite this, what the student experience of life skills learning means for day-to-day teaching can be difficult to picture. Is it discrete individual lessons about part of the WHO’s definition? Is it traditional lessons like maths, literacy, and science which implicitly teach these skills? Is it practising skills that young people will need for daily life in their classrooms and beyond? Is it something which teachers teach, or should this learning be happening at home?

What the student experience of life skills learning really means for day-to-day teaching can be difficult to picture.

These are some of the problems that Gesher’s Inclusion Team, (Danielle Petar and Matt Summers), grappled with when they first set out to develop Gesher’s own life skills scheme at the start of 2020 — and they are sharing their experience in the hope that it will be of value to others. Two years on, this scheme, called Bridges: Foundation, has been launched to Gesher’s students and will shortly also be introduced to parents. In anticipation of this, we sat down with Danielle and Matt to find out more about the journey they went on to design the scheme as well as some of its features.

Setting Up The Scheme

‘The notion of creating something which meets all of the WHO definition of life skills was exciting but also rather daunting. In the first stage of the process, we looked at the four key areas in the Government’s ‘pathway to adulthood’ guide. These are employment; independent living; good health; and friendships, relationships and community. However, we quickly realised that we’d need some more focus and to break these down further’. After going through various combinations of themes, the team decided on eight child-friendly themes.

Within each of these themes, there are eleven badges for the students to work towards achieving. In the ‘My Home’ theme, for example, the badges range from ‘Clearing the Table’ to ‘Preparing for Social Occasions’. ‘While each badge is very different they are all designed to focus on developing creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, the ability to communicate and collaborate, as well as commitment to personal and social responsibility.’

The approach is driven by the student’s motivation to learn new skills,  explore their areas of interest and develop their independence, as well as encouraging them to think about their future. Therefore, they have some autonomy in choosing their badges.

‘We were also eager to ensure that the young people themselves were included in the design process and it’s safe to say their feedback was refreshingly honest… It ultimately had a huge impact on the way the scheme looks from a visual perspective. Given that it’s the young people themselves who will be using the scheme, this is exactly what we wanted.’

The final stakeholder group that Danielle and Matt sought views from while in that crucial design phase was parents from the Gesher community. ‘The scheme was designed as an exciting journey that would foster a partnership between home and school, with students completing badges both at home and at school. As parents were going to be a vital part in implementing it, then it was equally important to get their input in the design process.’

Taking Ownership

The design of the Bridges scheme was very much focused on ensuring that students can take ownership of their learning. Within each life skill, there are four ‘steps’ to achieve along their journey that reflect an increasing level of independence and in this way students can see their progress.

As you journey through the different life skills badges, there are different steps along the way that you can take; each step leading you to be more independent.

 

 

 

Each step has a number of success criteria provided, which are visible and accessible to students. These were created by extensive research from the Inclusion team and in consultation with a wealth of other educational professionals (Occupational Therapists, Speech and Language Therapists, Educational Psychologists, Art Therapists, Teachers, Teaching Assistants and Dramatherapists).

The different steps are not age-related but rather based on a child’s own stage of development at any given time. Both the approach and the journey navigation are highly personalised.

‘Unlike the way that learning is normally structured, both the approach and the journey navigation are highly personalised. The different steps are not age-related but rather based on a child’s own stage of development at any given time and based on their individual skills and needs. We did this to reflect the fact that a young person’s journey to adulthood is not linear and they will navigate their own winding path.’ Put another way, both the approach and the journey navigation are highly personalised.

Beyond Practising Daily Skills and Student Ownership

Unlike more traditional life skills schemes, Gesher’s reach is broader in terms of the themes it covers and has a greater focus on softer skills like decision-making and critical thinking. ‘We wanted the scheme to be aspirational, more than a means by which to practise daily tasks.’ This is evident in the inclusion of themes like ‘My Imagination’ and ‘My World’, which encompass skills like ‘Making a gift’ and ‘Learning about a religion’.

This breadth means that young people don’t just work on their life skills badges in the classroom but in a home context as well. ‘The success criteria for each level have been designed to include language that is accessible for students as well as the adults in their lives.’ To further promote this, students work on a minimum of three badges at a time. The idea is that one is chosen by their teacher to work on in the classroom and relates to their project-based learning; one is chosen alongside the adults at home; while the last is selected by the young people themselves. This badge they will work on both at home and at school. ‘Obtaining these badges at home and at school should be both meaningful and fun and will hopefully open up new experiences for students as they navigate their own journeys to adulthood. It’s also important to say that there is no limit on how many badges a student can be working on at any one time. The scheme is designed to give them the opportunity to explore and to be ambitious.’

Hiding in Plain Sight

The eight themes ensure that the life skills curriculum is incorporated across the school from the Early Years class to the students in Year 8. This will allow students to become familiar with the skills they need for adulthood as early as possible in their education journey. Each class has one discrete life skills session a week where they work on their chosen badges. This is led by the school’s ‘life skills champion’ and the class teacher. In addition, for students at Gesher who are less likely to graduate with traditional academic qualifications such as GCSE and may follow a more vocational route, life skills sessions are taught daily in small groups.

As well as this dedicated time, the school’s holistic approach to learning means that badges can be worked on during students’ therapy sessions or in-class sessions through project-based learning. What will be obvious is that the approach (student ownership, personalisation, real-world tasks, school and community, etc) has many features in common with the project-based learning approach to the wider curriculum.

Next Steps

Whilst the Bridges scheme is very much underway, it will evolve and the team is already planning to create further resources to support the teaching of each life skill. They are also in the process of creating the next stage of the scheme, Bridges: For Life. This will expand on the four areas of preparing for adulthood and ensure that the students build on the life skills they’ve already developed through the Foundations scheme. This article offers a window into an important aspect of our work, one of which we are proud — both the scheme itself and the process through which it was developed. If you want to know more, please contact Gesher.

Legacy

Gesher is both privileged and humbled that this scheme has been made possible by working in collaboration with the Daniels family in order to honour the extraordinary life of Sonya Daniels, their wife, mother and grandmother.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • We all know how important life skills are for young people. How well established is (a) your curriculum for life skills; (b) your assessment processes?

  • In particular, how coherent is your life skills work with SEND youngsters?

  • Does the idea of badges have any merit for you?

Changing Schools, Changing Lives

15th December 2022Website Admin

Changing Schools, Changing Lives

Sam Dexter

Authentic Voices

Reflecting on the content that appeared in the first issue of The Bridge, we noticed a pattern. There was a lot from the perspective of neurotypical adult experts, but very little from the perspective of neurodiverse young people. This worried us. How could we be creating an educational journal about educating neurodiverse young people, without including the voices of these young people? This is clearly not right.

So, in this issue, and all future issues, there will be a dedicated space reserved solely for pupil voice — featuring the first-hand views of neurodiverse young people. For this issue, we spoke to five young people about how life at Gesher is different from the experiences they had in their previous schools.

Different in the Classroom

All of the students we spoke to described how learning at Gesher was different from their previous schools. One student said, ‘I didn’t learn anything… all I ever did was play around and make things’. When asked what it is like now at Gesher that differs he replied by saying: ‘I have more support here’ and ‘I like learning more… I like learning more so I get even smarter.’

Another  student, also speaking on the theme of support, told us how in his previous school:

‘I was learning, learning, learning but didn’t understand one thing and there was no support for me. They just said, you have to do it yourself… In this school, there is a lot more support, like if you don’t understand something, they explain it in a different way.’

The students told us how things were taught differently at Gesher. ‘I find learning better because it’s taught differently. We get to do PBL (Project-Based Learning)… which is fun and creative.’ For another student, not having the pressure of traditional assessment was a huge relief. ‘They [student’s previous school] had lots of tests. And I’m actually glad that my mum put me in this school because otherwise, I would have had to deal with lots and lots and lots of SATs exams.’

The approach to emotional regulation helps in the classroom.

A common theme related to how Gesher’s approach to emotional regulation also helps them in the classroom. ‘I can ask for a break and that means I’ll go outside and when I’m ready I’ll come back’. Another student described how, if the learning environment was too noisy, he knew to ask for ear defenders or he had the freedom simply to find them himself.

Different Outside the Classroom

Another feature shared was how school life is different outside the classroom at Gesher. Around this topic, two main themes emerged: friendship and the school’s therapy dogs. Relationships are a big focus at Gesher (they matter a lot for neurodiverse young people) and on the topic of friendship, students explained how Gesher provided them with the opportunity to build new relationships. ‘School can help us make new friends if we meet more people.’ [That same student went on to ask if the purpose of TThe Bridge was to bring more students to Gesher, suggesting that if it was, there would be ‘more friends also’.]

Other students felt that Gesher had allowed them to develop new interests and passions. ‘I like the fact that school can help me get interested in different things, [friend’s name] has got me interested in Minecraft and stuff like that.’ Another interviewee emphasised that Gesher provided the opportunity and support to build new relationships.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all students spoke enthusiastically about the positive impact that the visits of Gesher’s therapy dogs, Puplinda and Toby, had on their well-being:

Gesher student: I like it when Puplinda comes to visit.

Interviewer: Why?

Gesher Student: She makes me feel happy and calm.

Others spoke about being excited when Puplinda came to their class and were very concerned that she hadn’t visited for two weeks due to an operation (she is recovering well and will be back in Therapy Dog action before this article goes live).

The improvements mentioned are being followed up.

Always Room For Improvement

As well as hearing their views about what was different between their previous school and Gesher, we also asked what could improve their experience. The most commonly mentioned area for improvement was the playground, with students discussing how there could be more exercise equipment, more swings and slides, and some more creative activities. Another liked that the playground was a ‘very big area’ but felt that the surface material is ‘very tough… every time I slip a bit, I end up with everything in the cut, like rocks and everything.’

This part of each interview was important because it helped to give students agency over the process — not just wanting to hear the positives, but also to learn how we can make things even better. Mindful also of not wanting simply to be a passive ear for young people’s views and concerns, the improvements they mentioned are being followed up by one of Gesher’s Deputy Heads.

For Practitioners: Things We Have Learned 

  • A useful mantra for thinking about ‘student voice’, especially that of neurodiverse young people, is ‘nothing about us without us’. As such, reflect on something within your setting that you want to change/are already planning to change. How might you gather the views of some of your neurodiverse learners about what this change might mean for them?
  • The process of gathering student perspectives and insights with neurodiverse young people can be more time-consuming because there are additional barriers compared to collecting the views of neurotypical young people. We have learned (a) to have a trusted adult ask the questions (quite often not a teacher); (b) to conduct the interview away from the classroom, and (c) to keep it short!
  • The use of visuals can support students to share their views about something, especially where a verbal interview doesn’t play to a young person’s strengths. In the Resources for Schools section of this issue we have included an example of the ‘Three Houses’ model, a simple tool to elicit the view of a young person who finds it challenging to verbally express their feelings.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all five young people who gave up some of their playtime to share their views with us, and to Gesher’s Deputy Head and Dramatherpist, Mr Chris, who was the ‘trusted person’ who conducted the group interview.

Making the Most of Therapies in Your Setting

15th December 2022Website Admin

Making the Most of Therapies in Your Setting

Victoria Rutter

The ever-changing political landscape has seen far-reaching implications for education and health services; spending cuts have been severe and there is currently a real disparity across the country in the amount and type of therapeutic provision available to children with SEND. It is interesting to reflect on the journey of how therapies emerged in schools, and to observe the inherent successes, but also the frustrations; frustrations largely due to ‘not enough’ rather than the quality of provision.

It is abundantly clear, from both research and anecdotal evidence, that the best possible model for effecting quality provision for each child is to do this within a team. In this case, the team would be school, parents and therapies.

Within School, Not Withdrawn

Historically children were taken out of school to attend therapy sessions in local community clinics and hospitals. This obviously disrupted children’s education and meant there was limited opportunity for liaison with school staff, and also that skills acquired in therapy had little chance of being generalised into everyday school life. With the advent of Statements of Special Educational Needs (Statements) — now Education, Health Care Plans  (EHCPs) — the NHS began to place Therapists in both mainstream and SEND schools. Subsequently, Local Authorities (LAs), through joint funding with the NHS, began financially and operationally to support this model and Therapists began to work regularly in schools to see children — both with and without EHCPs.

Therapists as Members of Staff

Schools and parents could really see the benefit of children receiving therapies in their school environment. However, they also became increasingly frustrated by the amount of input they were being offered, with both the NHS and LAs rationing services due to a never-ending series of spending cuts. Schools began to recruit their own Therapists, giving them more control over the frequency of input, and allowing Therapists and school staff the opportunity truly to work collaboratively as part of a team around the children and young people in education.

Cut to today and this model is seen in both SEND and mainstream schools across the UK. Some settings have multi-disciplinary therapy teams on site full-time, while others have Therapists either employed directly by them or contracted via independent Therapists and practices. Therapists may visit weekly, half-termly or termly depending on the needs and budgets of individual schools.

Arrangements in one SEND School

At Gesher, therapy is not seen as an ‘add-on’, instead, it is part of the overall curriculum and is designed and delivered in tandem with the educational and social curriculum. Therapy targets are woven into all aspects of day-to-day school life, and therapies can be delivered in a variety of ever more creative ways. Staff upskill each other and are able to plan jointly and run interventions.

As in most settings, therapy staff work to a three-tiered approach: Universal (for all), Targeted (for small groups) and Specialist (for individuals). It is at the Universal level that the work can really make an impact: devising, teaching, modelling and reviewing whole-school approaches such as communication and sensory-friendly classrooms, signs and visually supported speech, Zones of Regulation, Movement breaks, facilitating lunchtime chats, playground games and Fun with Food.

Some Lessons For Any School

This model can differ from setting to setting, particularly in mainstream schools. So, what can a regular school do to maximise the impact of therapeutic support where provision can be limited in frequency?

Preparation is Key

Identify the key person who will liaise and plan with the Therapist. This is usually the Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities Coordinator (SENDco). The SENDco can then ask school staff and senior leaders to come up with a list of priorities and areas for development with regard to the particular Therapist that is working with your school; this could include:

  • Identifying particular children (specialist) or groups of children (targeted) who may require assessment and/or intervention
  • Identifying areas of universal need for your particular school, for example: vocabulary, listening, play, handwriting, sensory regulation, etc
  • Creating optimal learning environments such as communication and sensory-friendly classrooms
  • Identifying opportunities for Team Teaching to model and embed Quality First teaching strategies
  • You may wish to identify a Teaching Assistant with relevant skills and/or interest to also liaise with the Therapists and who helps to coordinate and deliver the therapeutic interventions in school
  • Identifying training needs for all staff
  • Identifying training needs for identified staff
  • Identifying pieces of work with parents.

Plan For Each Visit

The SENDco and Therapist can make a joint plan prior to the visit, by email, which ensures:

  • The priorities of the school are met in a timely way
  • School staff are aware that Therapists will be in school/class
  • Parents are informed
  • The Therapist knows in advance what assessments/resources to bring in
  • Time is ring-fenced for the SENDco and Therapist to meet
  • A room can be booked in which to assess children and meet with staff and/or parents.

Taking children out for one-to-one work may be necessary if outlined in a child’s EHCP. In these circumstances, a Teaching Assistant should be able to accompany the child to observe and participate in the session and effect meaningful carry-over. If you are unavailable to catch up at the end of the visit, ask the Therapist to send you a summary of who was seen, meetings that took place, interventions/training carried out, etc.

How Do I Go About Commissioning a Therapist?

It may be cost-effective to link up with other local schools to ‘buy in’ Therapists and many independent Therapists and practices have a choice of bespoke packages to suit a range of needs and budgets.

For further guidelines and information on commissioning Therapies in schools, see the links below:

Speech & Language Therapy

Independent Speech & Language Therapists

Occupational Therapy

Dramatherapy

Art Therapy

Educational Psychology

 

Therapists share the frustration and challenges of our colleagues in education regarding provision.  However, as suggested above, there are ways to maximise outcomes and utilise the therapy provision a school does have.

In essence, those universal approaches will have a significant impact and are achievable and sustainable. Investing in staff training and setting up whole-school approaches benefits all students, leaving the precious remaining Therapy time directed where it is needed the most.

Building From Passions and Interests

15th December 2022Website Admin

Building From Passions and Interests

Sam Dexter

In the first issue of The Bridge, we introduced Gesher’s Five Design Principles. These principles were developed by members of the Gesher community, friends and supporters of Gesher, and with input from members of the wider community. They are central to everything that happens at Gesher and as such, across the next five issues of The Bridge, we will look at how they are put into practice.

For this issue, we spoke to Monique Lauder, a Teaching Assistant in the Early Years/Year 1 Class about Gesher’s second design principle; personalised learning informed by young people’s passions and interests. Monique has spent twenty-one years working in Early Years settings and joined Gesher two years ago. In that time she has developed her own approach to personalising sensory trays and tuff trays.

The decision about what to include in the trays is driven by her deep knowledge of the young people.

Sensory Trays and Tuff Trays

Sensory trays and Tuff trays are a regular  feature of many Early Years and Key Stage 1 classrooms.  They promote and support language development, gross and fine motor skills and support children to develop their problem-solving skills. They are typically large plastic trays filled with materials such as shredded paper, coloured rice, pasta, different types of lentils, couscous, shaving foam, or water. They also often include small-world play items or objects linked to a topic. When we sat down to chat with Monique, her latest sensory trays were full of small white stones, tweezers, and what looked to me suspiciously like old Weetabix.

… the personalisation of learning informed by young people’s passions and interests.

Planning and Creating the Personalised Trays

For Monique, the decision about what to include in the trays is driven by her deep knowledge of the young people she works with. ‘I try to get something I know will interest them, maybe someone is really into cars, so I would put cars in that tray… It’s mostly about looking at the children, seeing what they really like, asking them what they like and going from there.’

As well as knowing about the interests of the young people she works with, Monique also discussed how a young person’s individual targets feed into the personalisation of a tray. ‘A lot of our students have targets related to communication and interactions so I use the trays to encourage role-play… the students are seeing their friends or adults playing in a certain way or interacting with an object in a certain way and they’re able to do the same.’ Monique also told us how, if a student is working on a very specific target, that can be practised in the tray. For a student working on recognising numbers up to twenty, for instance, putting objects in the tray and asking students to find them, means the skill from a maths lesson can be practised throughout the day. The student’s Project-Based Learning (PBL) topic also helps Monique to decide how to personalise a tray. A PBL topic usually runs for half a term so one of the trays will also be linked to this.

Monique also shared with us how her approach to planning and setting up the trays has developed throughout her time at Gesher. ‘At first, I was doing two a week but I changed it because I felt that students needed more time to explore’. Now, Monique will change the trays once a week and this gives the students much more time to be curious and work out which different sensory experiences they like and don’t like. ‘The other thing I’m trying to do more is implement what the students are doing in the classroom into the trays.’ At this point in our chat, the young people Monique works with came charging in from the playground. After taking off their coats and putting away their bags, they headed straight for the trays filled with the white stones and Weetabix. One of them grabbed a picture of a mouth and the other immediately picked up the tweezers asking who wanted to be the first dentist to collect the teeth. Monique explained that their topic this term was healthy bodies and that specifically this week they were looking at how to keep healthy (and that I was correct, it was old Weetabix).

Monique’s Tips for Creating a Personalised Sensory Tray

Ideas

The vast majority of Monique’s ideas come from knowing the young people she works with really well, so her biggest piece of advice is to take time to build relationships with the young people. Once you’ve done this you can start including personalised objects in the sensory tray and build the process up from there. Knowledge of a young person’s targets and next steps will also ensure the tray can be further personalised to their needs, as can a broad awareness of the curriculum experiences they are having.

Resources

Monique told us how most of her resources come from things she would have usually recycled, like food containers and packaging, as well as natural materials from the garden like leaves, conkers and acorns. A store of these materials can be built up relatively quickly, especially if more than one person is contributing to it. The materials could then be shared between classes and reused for different topics. Finally, she said that shops like B&M, Tiger, Poundland and Wilko are great places to get inspiration (and often bargains!)

End Note

Whilst the work that Monique does is specifically related to sensory trays, this article is also about something much bigger — the personalisation of learning informed by young people’s passions and interests. The principles are the same whether it is six or seven-year-olds or much older learners — build relationships; know the learner well; involve the learner; connect to the real world; and design experiences relevant to their learning ambitions.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • We included this article because Monique’s sensory trays provide a highly accessible example of personalisation in practice. What is the best example in your school?

  • This example is built on relationships — and knowing students’ SEND needs, learning challenges and passions. Who in your school has this relationship with SEND learners?

Critical Friendship Groups: Think ‘Fireside Chats’

15th December 2022Website Admin

Critical Friendship Groups: Think ‘Fireside Chats’

David Jackson

Gesher School serves children who learn differently — many of whom have had highly stressful school experiences previously.

To do a brilliant job for these children, we want to be the best that we can be — the best in well-being, best in assessment, in project-based learning design and facilitation, in exhibitions, best community links, best staff development, best parent engagement, skilled in the use of technology and so on.  Not best or better in any comparative way — just the best that we can be to serve the young people, adults and families who are part of our school community…

We need to be the most informed and intentional learning organisation that we can be.

To do that we need to be the most informed and intentional learning organisation that we can be, and one feature of that is to reach out to people who have relevant knowledge and experience to help us with dilemmas or ‘problems of practice’ and to debate with us key elements of our ambition. One strategy for this is Critical Friendship Groups.

Critical Friendship Groups (CFGs)

Gesher started as a primary school and is now an all-through school. For the first 18 months of its existence as an all-through school, it is emphatically in learning mode. We plan to harness the goodwill and professional generosity of the school’s multiple partners and connections to establish a small number of CFGs around key themes that are central to the school’s success.

At the time of writing we have held one CFG so far, on the theme of well-being, when we asked our critical friends:

How do you empower young people to manage and own their own mental and emotional well-being through adolescence and beyond school?

Eight people from backgrounds as diverse as the Anna Freud Centre and Place2Be, and as geographically spread as Bolton to Israel, met online for two hours to engage in a facilitated conversation, the outcomes of which will be featured in Issue 3 of The Bridge. We plan to share both a think-piece distilled from that session and also a tool or framework that might be of practical value to teachers.

Critical Friendship Group Objectives

There are four objectives to CFGs, which are:

  1. To connect Gesher with advanced practice and thinking around issues linked to the school’s ambitions, and to the needs of the SEND sector.
  2. To build relationships with people who have experience, knowledge and insights that can help to advance Gesher’s work and the work of the sector.
  3. To generate usable knowledge and ideas around key ‘problems of practice’.
  4. To create an informal space that allows people to engage and contribute to Gesher’s evolution.

We hope, of course, to learn a huge amount. And we plan to share the things that we learn which are of collective value through the journal.

For the moment, we offer up the idea of ‘fireside chats’ with a group of people who know stuff and who care about young people’s learning, as one that might have value for other schools.

The Value of Getting it Right for Each Child: A View From Parents

7th April 2022Duncan Robertson

The Value of Getting it Right for Each Child: A View From Parents

 

ʻThe Bridgeʼ is an adult learning journal for and by educators – which includes community members with an interest in young peopleʼs learning. This first issue would not be appropriately balanced if it didnʼt include the voice and reflections of parents. In fact, we intend that every issue of ʻThe Bridgeʼ will include articles by parents and community members who have experiences to share.

 

What it feels like when a school doesn’t understand your child

Our daughter was previously in a local mainstream school with 1:1 support. She would regularly be separated from the other children in her class in order to receive various therapies and in order to carry out her learning.

We knew she wasnʼt happy because we had frequent reports of her pulling her learning assistantʼs and other teaching staffʼs hair. She started stimming (self-stimulating behaviour) at this time by waving her arms around; this was evidently her way of coping within the experience of boredom and isolation and yet it marked her out as different, leading to yet more of a sense of alienation both on her part (and mine).

Our daughterʼs difficulties in all areas such as speaking, attention, large motor movements, were making it difficult for her to join in classroom activities. It was clear that she was suffering from anxiety. She was being and would be increasingly failed by the mainstream education system and I could see things would only get worse if we didnʼt find another school for her.

The staff within her school were clearly overwhelmed and they didnʼt really know how to support us or how to deal with us.

This was obvious from our meetings with them. They didnʼt know how to help our daughterʼs learning, nor did they know how to help manage her behaviour and it was evident that we represented a burden or a problem for them.

I didnʼt have much of a connection or common point of contact with other parents owing to our experience being so different.

Our daughter lacked confidence when she was in peer group situations and she would often shrink back and stick to the adults in the room. I recall birthday parties and park playgrounds being particularly tense times for both of us.

 

How did you know when you had found the right school?

You can tell when a school knows what it is doing. When we found Gesher, the corridors were calm and distraction free and there was an atmosphere of peace and contentment and also a positive can-do attitude amongst the staff.

It was clear to us that this was going to be the best place for our daughter, not least because her severe speech dyspraxia was making any kind of integration into mainstream schooling increasingly complicated.

We knew that people would take the time to listen to her and to try to understand what she was saying, that she would be encouraged to communicate. She would be able to join in group activities without being separated. Immediately, we felt that Gesher would see us, not as a problem or hindrance, but rather as an opportunity.

 

What it means to belong

When children are encouraged to feel a sense of belonging to their school, not just to their class, that is really important. A whole school focus on inclusion, support and nurturing of children means that children are encouraged to learn good values and the importance of taking responsibility for themselves and for others. This is crucial.

I really appreciate here that therapy is integrated, meaning no child is singled out or isolated, while at the same time each student has their own learning plan. Each child is included and also cared for.

 

When your child (and you) are truly seen and valued

Our daughter has flourished, blossomed even, into a confident young girl who has a strong sense of who she is. She is no longer scared to try new things. Her ability to focus and to give her attention to a task has grown too. Her speaking is improving day by day. She is so happy to be part of a wider community. She wakes up each day with a sense of purpose and curiosity which is exactly how we should all be in life.

As parents we no longer feel alone in the experience of having a special needs child. When we go through a difficult time, or we have a specific issue, or we need some practical help, we know that we have other parents and teachers to whom we can reach out. That has made a phenomenal difference to our lives. We have started to feel a sense of optimism about our future as a family.