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The town of Blyth, in which the school is located, is a post-industrial town which continues to experience economic and social decline. Although the majority of our children are from homes in south-east Northumberland, we also have children who travel from other parts of the county, requiring longer travel times. The vast majority of children are transported to school by the local authority.
The Council and partners are working to improve preventative approaches and access to early help through increasing the number of early help assessments, team around the family and early help plans. To support this ‘Local Early Help Hubs’ have been piloted and developed in the Blyth Valley at the initiation of The Dales School. These are now to be ‘rolled out’ across all 4 regions of Northumberland.
Keeping Children and Young People Safe from Harm, Abuse and Neglect
The Dales School was last inspected in October 2013 when it was identified as ‘Outstanding’.
The Dales School caters for children with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) / Statements of Special Educational Need, identified as those with needs related to Autistic Spectrum Condition; Social Emotional and Mental Health needs, and Speech, Language and Communication Difficulties in the age range of 2–11 years old.
In recent years, there has been a gradual change in the degree and complexity of needs with which children present on admission. This includes those with a morbidity of conditions / needs and those who are disadvantaged by socio-neurological conditions such as foetal alcohol syndrome. The significant increase in children on roll who present with pronounced delayed development and limited potential in relation to independence has resulted in a review of provision for this key area. As a result, we focus much of our work through a life-skills, sensory and creative curriculum.
Assessment on entry includes: Academic; Behavioural, and other (including medical / social). The process of ‘induction’ into school, follows a set programme of assessment and review involving the child, parents / carers, staff and reports.
Children in the EYFS enter school at a level well below children of a similar age. Their communication, language and literacy and personal, social emotional development are mainly at emerging stages. As a result of the schools’ strong focus on communication and personal development, the children have made good progress in these areas by the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage.
Other pupils, prior to joining the school, have experienced significant disruption in their education and the majority have been identified with additional learning needs. This has had a significant impact on the development of their knowledge and skills, which on entry to school are well below those expected for their age. On entry to the school a significant number, particularly those who are in the care of the local authority also lack the social and emotional skills they need to better access learning.
Teaching staff are highly skilled in making and maintaining positive relationships and as a result, pupils learn well and are supported well in developing emotionally and socially.
The school has good data and uses PIVATs and EYFS data to track progress.
In lessons, pupils communicate enthusiastically about their work; a sign of how much they enjoy their learning. In addition the interdependence of assessment and target setting have a positive impact on the degree and pace of progress which children are motivated to make.
Pupils achieve well across the curriculum because the highly effective interventions are personalised and have a positive impact on pupils’ literacy and numeracy skills and on their confidence in their learning.
Achievement overall is outstanding for pupils who are established (2 years plus on role) in school.
There are 10 teaching groups accommodating a maximum of 10 children in any one group. Children are grouped in consideration to age and stage in an effort to offer the best possible opportunity to engage with learning.
In addition, children are supported by specialist trained staff in: Speech, language, communication, Massage, Physiotherapy, Rebound Therapy, Play Therapy, Rebound Therapy, and Art Therapy.
A group of experienced non-teaching staff and one part-time teacher make up our ‘Intervention Team’.
Further support is provided by a Family Support Coordinator and a Family Learning Coordinator
Working with families at The Dales School
At The Dales School, we understand the importance of working with Families and the impact this can have on the education of our children. All staff in school work very hard to build relationships with our Parents/ Carers. This is ongoing and we offer an ‘Open Door Policy’. We do, however, offer Intensive Support to Parents/Carers and this is delivered by the Family Support Co-ordinator and the Family Learning Co-ordinator.
Family Support
The Dales supports the families of children:-
- By being a contact in school to offer advice/ information, and help parents / carers access other agencies / services who may be able to help.
- By supporting parents / carers on visits to other agencies or schools.
- By providing workshops, training and events, to empower parents and give them a greater understanding of their child’s needs.
- Being available for 1:1 sessions to support with any issues that parents have.
- Helping parents / carers build relationships with other parents and carers of children with similar needs.
Parents and carers are acutely aware that, working together we can make a difference and, are committed to supporting The Dales in provision of high quality and effective learning opportunities for their children.
Family Learning
Families will be involved with their child’s education and learning in school and offer advice and support for each other. These sessions allow parents to develop a relationship with school and staff. Children are happy when their parents are joining in at school. Parents can build their own confidence and skills and create new relationships with other parents. They are reassured their children are receiving a good education. Work and skills can be created to be implemented at home.
The use of the Pupil Premium to promote achievement:
The Intervention Team
The Dales School caters for children (age 2 -11) with a range of special educational needs, or as we prefer to view their need – children who have individual educational challenges. In addition to teaching and support staff the school employs range of specialist assistants, including: a Speech and Language assistant; a Physiotherapy Assistant; a Family Learning coordinator; a Family Support Worker; Emotional Literacy Support Assistants, and; an Intervention coordinator. Pupils attend from across the county of Northumberland and some have experienced significant disruption in their education prior to joining The Dales. Most pupils are White British and a high proportion of pupils are known to be eligible for free school meals. One pupil speaks English as an additional language.
Many of the children who attend the school reflect the complex and changing areas of focus in SEND provision including pupils with ASC and FAS. The school manages a number apprentice Teaching Assistants. We have the ambition of building skills and capacity in the local community and a ‘grow our own’ approach to finding staff sympathetic to the ethos and philosophy of the school, which is strongly committed to therapeutic interventions.
Intervention
The term ‘intervention’ often has an association with behaviour in SEND settings. At the Dales it is associated with therapeutic approaches to emotional issues experienced by children.
Intervention starts for pupils at the Dales School before they are admitted. Children are visited in their present setting, parents are invited to school to help plan provision, and the pupil is invited to school. After the first month in school, during which time a full induction package is delivered and recorded, a baseline assessment is carried out, followed by a whole staff ‘clinic’ where the school’s plans and potential interventions for the child are discussed. This is an opportunity to discover whether prior assessments have accurately described the pupil.
The assessment procedure for new entrants to The Dales has three key areas of focus: Behavioural, Speech and Language and, Academic. For most pupils, the key to making academic progress will depend very much on overcoming barriers to learning that are associated with behaviour, speech and language.
Costs
The full staffing cost of the intervention team is greater than the pupil premium which follows the Looked After Children and those who register as eligible for Free School Meals.
In terms of being able to demonstrate that the pupil premium is being used to tackle disadvantage, and promote opportunities for pupils to progress and achieve academic milestones they would not have otherwise reached, the intervention team achieves its aim, and offers benefits that are wide ranging and accessed by the entire school population.
At the end of their time at The Dales the staff prepare and support the child and family in the transition. This includes, where appropriate: Supported pre-visits, meetings with receptor schools (of staff, children and families), transfer of current information and data, transfer of support services ( e.g. Social Services, CHYPS, etc).
The Dales Teaching School Alliance
The Dales School was designated a Lead Teaching School in October 2014. We are also a National Support School and, the Head Teacher is a National Leader in Education. A consultant is commissioned to coordinate the activities of The Teaching School Alliance. Within our partners are both maintained and academy schools covering the age range from 2 – 19.
The Dales and 3 other Lead Teaching Schools (all of whom are Specialist schools) have come together into one cohesive group, working together to the benefit of all the schools within their alliances and other Specialist provision in the region and nationally.
As a National Support School, and previously before designation, staff from The Dales School have worked to offer support and guidance to other schools and colleagues in matters of Specialist provision. As a result we have worked with schools from other regions of the U.K. and throughout Europe. The latter through British Council Comenius projects over the last 8 years.
In another initiative, The Dales staff have, for the last 3 years, conducted an annual ‘Good Practice Day’ for local SCITT students.
Facilities
The Dales School is accommodated in what was previously a Middle School, built in the 1930s.
Since September 2010 there has been a rolling programme of improvement to facilities and accommodation. As a result we now have:-
- A school garden with associated ‘potting shed’ and wildlife hide / classroom.
- A sensory room.
- Refurbished the gymnasium.
- Developed the school hall to create performance / conference area.
- 3 x external teaching areas with direct access from the adjacent classrooms.
- Developed 2 classrooms with facility to convert to one with opening, sound-proofed, doors.
- Developed ‘The Garden House’. A 3 bedroomed house which can ‘sleep’ 8 children and 2 staff, renovated and extended to include a conservatory with access to the garden.
- A soft-play room.
- A play park.
- An outdoor Active Zone
- Improved parking facilities.
- Improved access security.
- ICT throughout the school, including wireless systems.
- A central quad area with soft surface and shelter.
- Development of the school office to accommodate increased staff.
- Provision of 2 x minibuses and a ‘people-carrier’ vehicle.
Newsletters
Latest news
23rd May, 2018
Parenting Group Sessions
17th May, 2018
Safeguarding Conference
3rd May, 2018
Carers and Adoptive Parents Group
29th March, 2018
NHS Speech and Language Parent Survey
21st March, 2018
Family Conference Evaluations
May Day
12:00pm
Summer Mid-Term Holidays
All day
Privacy and cookies policy
Part 1: Personal information and privacy
- Introduction
- We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors; this policy sets out how we will treat your personal information on the domain or a sub-domain of eschools.co.uk
- We will ask you to consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy when you first visit the domain or sub-domain of eschools.co.uk. By using our website and agreeing to this policy, you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy.
- Collecting personal information
- We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:
- information about your computer and about your visits to and use of this website (including, your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, operating system, referral source, length of visit, page views and website navigation paths)
- information that you provide to us when registering with our website
- information that you provide to us for the purpose of subscribing to our email notifications and/or newsletters (including, your name and email address)
- information that you post to our website for publication on the internet (including, your username and the content of your posts)
- information contained in or relating to any communications that you send to us or send through our website (including, the communication content and meta data associated with the communication)
- any other personal information that you choose to send to us
- Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person's consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with the terms of this policy.
- We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal information:
- Using your personal information
- Personal information submitted to us through our website will be used for the purposes specified in this policy or on the relevant pages of the website.
- We may use your personal information to:
- administer our website
- personalise our website for you
- enable your use of the services available on our website
- send you non-marketing commercial communications
- send you email notifications that you have specifically requested
- send you our email newsletter, if you have requested it (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require the newsletter)
- send you marketing communications relating to our business which we think may be of interest to you, by post or, where you have specifically agreed to this, by email or similar technology (you can inform us at any time if you no longer require marketing communications)
- provide third parties with statistical information about our users (but those third parties will not be able to identify any individual user from that information)
- deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to our website
- keep our website secure and prevent fraud
- If you submit personal information for publication on our website, we will publish and otherwise use that information in accordance with the licence you grant to us.
- Your privacy settings can be used to limit the publication of your information on our website, and can be adjusted using privacy controls on the website.
- We will not, without your express consent, supply your personal information to any third party for the purpose of their or any other third party's direct marketing.
- Disclosing personal information
- We may disclose your personal information to, any of our employees, officers, insurers, professional advisers, agents, suppliers or subcontractors insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.
- We may disclose your personal information to any member of our group of companies (this means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and all its subsidiaries) insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.
- We may disclose your personal information:
- to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
- in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings;
- in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk);
- to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.
- Except as provided in this policy, we will not provide your personal information to third parties.
- International data transfers
- Information that we collect may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which we operate in order to enable us to use the information in accordance with this policy.
- Personal information that you publish on our website or submit for publication on our website may be available, via the internet, around the world. We cannot prevent the use or misuse of such information by others.
- Retaining personal information
- This Section 6 sets out our data retention policies and procedure, which are designed to help ensure that we comply with our legal obligations in relation to the retention and deletion of personal information.
- Personal information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.
- Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Section 6, we will retain documents (including electronic documents) containing personal data:
- to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
- if we believe that the documents may be relevant to any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings; and
- in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk).
- Security of your personal information
- We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information.
- We will store all the personal information you provide on our secure (password- and firewall-protected) servers.
- You acknowledge that the transmission of information over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.
- Amendments
- We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website.
- You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are happy with any changes to this policy.
- Your rights
- You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you.
- We may withhold personal information that you request to the extent permitted by law.
- You may instruct us at any time not to process your personal information for marketing purposes.
- In practice, you will usually either expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal information for marketing purposes, or we will provide you with an opportunity to opt out of the use of your personal information for marketing purposes.
- Third party websites
- Our website includes hyperlinks to, and details of, third party websites.
- We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.
- Updating information
- Please let us know if the personal information that we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.
Part 2: Cookies
- About cookies
- A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.
- Cookies may be either "persistent" cookies or "session" cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.
- Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.
- Cookies can be used by web servers to identity and track users as they navigate different pages on a website and identify users returning to a website.
- Our cookies
- We use both session and persistent cookies on our website.
- The names of the cookies that we use on our website, and the purposes for which they are used, are set out below:
- we use performance cookies on our website. These cookies enable the collection of information about how visitors use our website, including which pages visitors go to most often and if they receive error messages from certain pages. These cookies do not collect information that individually identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and anonymous. It is only used to improve how eSchools functions and performs.
- we use functional cookies on our website to allow eschools.co.uk to remember information you have entered or choices you make and provide enhanced, more personal features. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customize.
- We use third-party service providers to serve advertisements on our behalf across the Internet. These service providers may collect your IP address and non-personally identifiable information about your visits to our site in order to serve eSchools ads while you are visiting other websites. Such non-personally identifiable information is anonymous and does not include your name, address, email address or other personal information, however your IP address may be collected. The anonymous information is collected through the use of a pixel tag (also known as cookies and action tags), which is industry-standard technology used by most major websites.
- Analytics cookies
- We use Google Analytics to analyse the use of our website.
- Our analytics service provider generates statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies.
- The information generated relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of our website.
- Our analytics service provider's privacy policy is available at: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy.
- Third party cookies
- Our Site may contain links to other websites, share buttons (e.g. Twitter) or Facebook “Like” buttons. These other websites, services and applications may set their own cookies on users’ computers, collect data or solicit personal information. You should refer to any privacy policies found on such websites, services and applications to understand how your information may be collected and used.
- Blocking cookies
- Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies; for example:
- in Internet Explorer (version 10) you can block cookies using the cookie handling override settings available by clicking "Tools", "Internet Options", "Privacy" and then "Advanced";
- in Firefox (version 24) you can block all cookies by clicking "Tools", "Options", "Privacy", selecting "Use custom settings for history" from the drop-down menu, and unticking "Accept cookies from sites"; and
- in Chrome (version 29), you can block all cookies by accessing the "Customise and control" menu, and clicking "Settings", "Show advanced settings" and "Content settings", and then selecting "Block sites from setting any data" under the "Cookies" heading.
- Blocking all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites.
- If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features on our website.
- Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies; for example:
- Deleting cookies
- You can delete cookies already stored on your computer; for example:
- in Internet Explorer (version 10), you must manually delete cookie files (you can find instructions for doing so at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278835);
- in Firefox (version 24), you can delete cookies by clicking "Tools", "Options" and "Privacy", then selecting "Use custom settings for history", clicking "Show Cookies", and then clicking "Remove All Cookies"; and
- in Chrome (version 29), you can delete all cookies by accessing the "Customise and control" menu, and clicking "Settings", "Show advanced settings" and "Clear browsing data", and then selecting "Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data" before clicking "Clear browsing data".
- Deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.
- You can delete cookies already stored on your computer; for example: