Prep School Curriculum Learning Support
Learning Support
The Learning Support Department prides itself on giving its pupils every opportunity to reach their full potential through specialist lessons, in-class support, and therapies designed to develop areas of weakness whilst teaching through their strengths.
Fully qualified specialist tutors prepare Individual Education Plans, taking account of assessment results, the pupil’s and parents views and the current demands of the wider curriculum. These give class teachers information and strategies to inform their teaching and set targets for individual tuition within the Learning Support Department.
Enthusiastic mainstream class teachers are experienced in differentiating lesson content to make topics accessible to every pupil, whilst maintaining high expectations, and extending pupils so that they learn to think critically. The Learning Support team liaise closely with class teachers, which enables them to pre-teach or reinforce topics across the curriculum as necessary.
Pupils with Specific Learning Difficulties benefit from structured, incremental and repetitive teaching to develop reading, spelling and maths skills, therefore, much use is made of games, puzzles and computer software to make learning fun during Learning Support lessons.
The Learning Support tutors have a wide expertise and the department is fully and appropriately resourced. Pupils are able to benefit from Synthetic Phonics, the Lexia reading and spelling computer program, auditory, visual and perceptual training, development of social skills, fine and gross motor skills and a wide range of reading, spelling and language programmes, Speech and language therapy, and touch typing. Voice Activated software has recently been introduced and is already being used successfully by and increasing number of pupils for extended written assignments.
Tuition is given in research and study skills, proof reading and exam techniques as pupils reach Year 8 in preparation for important exams in which they are given every appropriate dispensation and support to demonstrate their subject knowledge, gain success and maintain self esteem.
The school believes that ‘if pupils don’t learn the way we teach, we must teach the way they learn’.