Salmons Brook School delivers a differentiated age 11-18 curriculum which is closely aligned with our young people’s levels of ability, interests, and aspirations. It is broad, balanced, relevant to needs and is designed to have integrated therapeutic support as necessary and a focus on developing resilience and preparing young people for the next stage in their lives. A combination of theory and practical learning opportunities is employed as appropriate both on our purpose-built site within the community.
This specialist curriculum is tailored to our young peoples’ individual needs and based on a person-centered planning framework. There is an underlying focus on improving literacy and numeracy skills alongside the development of personal and social skills and resilience in all subjects.
The aims of the curriculum are:
- To support young people to acquire positive moral attributes and character principles including teamwork, honesty, kindness, commitment, curiosity, fairness.
- To implement innovative and specialised interventions in line with those outlined in the student’s EHCP (Education Health and Care Plan) and in line with their personalised targets.
- To provide a broad and balanced curriculum that recognises students’ diverse learning needs and styles in a way which stretches and challenges them.
- To acquire the cultural knowledge and social confidence that allows them to put down deep roots and gives stability and longevity to lifetime aspirations.
Salmons Brook believes that a creative and culturally based approach enhances the curriculum offer. We are determined not to sacrifice rigor for creativity, believing that it is possible, with enough careful planning, to have both.
We expect to offer each student a personalised programme that aims to:
- Increase confidence in literacy and numeracy
- Build self-esteem through success, supported by expert developmental and cognitive pedagogy
- Develop learning skills so that everyone has the opportunity to study at least 5 GCSE subjects, or the equivalents
- Build computer literacy
- Develop functional skills, social, emotional and independence skills and employability skills in preparation for adulthood
- Improves community cohesion through engagement in local and national provision.
We are aware that learners with SEND do not always pursue purely academic pathways when they move on and so we acknowledge that some of the young people who attend Salmons Brook will want to follow vocational routes as a next stage and therefore we see vocational learning, as critical in supporting this transition.
Our Schools vision of CREATE is embedded within our curriculum through adopting a strengths-based and creative approach to learning.
A strengths-based approach to learning is about:
A strengths-based approach to education is to recognise and build on an individual young person's strengths, this may include character traits, academic, artistic, or sporting skills and knowledge, or any area of individual strength. Our interactions with students are used to continuously extrapolate strengths and talents and to provide students with the opportunity to discuss and put their strengths and talents at the centre of their education.
When working with students we spend a great deal of time exploring how we can address their areas of difficulties or identifying their unmet needs, through doing this we can often lose sight of the student’s positive qualities and strengths, if we can identify these with students and support them to connect with their strengths and apply them to their education and wider life we can support their growth and wellbeing and enable them to maximise their potential.
A creative approach to learning is about:
- Connecting: seeing relationships and combining in new ways
- Risking: having the self-confidence and freedom to fail and keep trying
- Envisaging: being original and imaginative about what might be
- Analysing: asking critical and challenging questions
- Thinking: taking time for reflection and various forms of thinking
- Interacting: sharing ideas and collaborating
- Varying: testing options and trying in different ways
- Elaborating: exploring, fiddling, and doing the unnecessary with love!
(Amended from Lifting The Lid On The Creative Curriculum NCSL 2007)
These approaches have guided and informed our unique 4 element curriculum. The 4 elements of our curriculum are as follows:
Element 1 – CREATE and Character
Element 2 – Intervention
Element 3 – Subject specialism
Element 4 - Enrichment
All 4 elements combine to enable indvidualised personal, social, and academic development for all our students.
Element 1 – CREATE and Character
At Salmons Brook our CREATE and Character curriculum is designed to enable our students to develop the knowledge of the Character domain and provide opportunities to practice the related skills and attributes in our community and then apply them to their wider lives and communities.
Students will be encouraged to:
- Develop the ability to remain motivated by long-term goals, to see a link between effort in the present and pay-off in the longer-term, overcoming and persevering through, and learning from, setbacks when encountered
- Learn and habituation of our 6-character traits
- Develop the acquisition of social confidence and the ability to make points or arguments clearly and constructively, listen attentively to the views of others
- Behave with courtesy and good manners, and speak persuasively to an audience
- Develop an appreciation of the importance of long-term commitments which frame a successful and fulfilled life. This helps individuals to put down deep roots and gives stability and longevity to lifetime endeavours.
The CREATE and Character curriculum develops young student's psychological resources and cultivates growth orientated ways of thinking. Students build on the knowledge and skills they have been developing in our daily CREATE time through their weekly Character lessons where we explore all elements of:
- Character strengths
- PSHE (Personal, Social, Health Education)
- Relationships and sex education, and health education
- Spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development,
- British values
- Citizenship
- Careers guidance
- Religious Education
Element 2 – Intervention
In addition to their learning needs, many students have missed large aspects of their educational entitlement prior to attending Salmons Brook School, and so they often begin their education here with levels of achievement and skills significantly below average. Our intent is to narrow the gap and enable students to make accelerated progress and achieve their full potential, both personally and academically.
The implementation of this is that each day students have a lesson which will enable them to work on their personal intervention plan, these will either be social circles, healing circles, academic circles of therapeutic circles. These are defined in the ‘Wellbeing’ policy. The use of Academic circles will provide students with the opportunity to work towards the targets identified on their EHCP, in addition to their subject specialist lessons.
Element 3 – Subject specialism
Each subject has an allocated number of lessons each week and within these lessons specialists will deliver a specialised curriculum (based on the National Curriculum) that enables all students to develop the knowledge and skills required for each subject discipline.
Each subject meets individual needs by delivering programmes of study in a manner that makes them accessible to all students. The curriculum design provides opportunities that are unique to each student, supported by high-quality on-site resources and the utilisation of the unique whole school environment.
Element 4 – Enrichment
At Salmons Brook Enrichment is one of our key values. We believe that Education should be fun, and we constantly seek to enrich learning opportunities by giving student a say in what they learn and engaging with external cultural partners such as Museums, Libraries, Archives, Film makers, The Woodland Trust, Film Club, Film Education as well as Theatres and professional associations.