2023-06-12
Inclusive Schools Role Model Georgia Skeen
Hello of my name is Georgia Skeen. A teacher currently teaching in year five and this is my fourth year of teaching. I am working the school called White House Primary School, which is, based in Stockton-on-Tees, in the northeast of England. We are mainly a two form entry school, we've got a smaller intake coming in at the moment, so we've got some split classes in year one and two. But historically, we've been a two form entry large school. We have provision here for SEN children with additional needs. And so we have physios that visit and we have separate classrooms for those children to learn maths and English in the morning, but we work as an inclusive school so that those children are facilitated in all aspects of the curriculum. So they spend time in a mainstream classroom every single day but then they do have the specialist provision in the morning for their English and math learning.
We are in a mixed catchment area, we have some very affluent families, and we have some families who are on the lower end of that scale and but for the most part, families are very, very supportive here. At the moment we've got a little bit of a rise of EAL children coming through the school, particularly lower down, historically up in the school, we have EAL children, but their parents are quite fluent in English language so it hasn't been too much of an issue. We are seeing more and more now. Parents who struggle with the English Language a little bit.
So, we have recently, undertaken, some whole school training around dealing with EAL parents, and how to support them with their children's learning, particularly down in the lower end of school, where they're doing phonics and thinking about the different sounds of how to read and how to spell and also on the flip side up in the year six when they're trying to write in the correct tense. We've noticed that, something that is sometimes an issue when you communicate from one language to the other.
On the same thing of languages in key Stage 2, we teach Spanish from in years three, four, five and six. That is hopefully trying to be weekly at the moment to try an integrate a different side of their learning. If we go back to the SEN side of things because that is such a huge part of why we are as a school. We do also have a hydrotherapy pool for students to use and students are taught about different kinds of special educational needs, so they can be completely immersed in that world and know how the different things can affect different peoples that are of their same age.
Parents, love that fact of this school and that's something that this school is really special for particularly in when they get up at the school in year five and six and parents start to look for different secondary schools, we find that parents are wanting to send those children to inclusive Secondary schools rather than sending them to special needs schools because they loved and enjoyed the atmosphere that we have here.
