Safeguarding and Welfare Officer

Riverside Bridge School 

Our motto “Excellence for All” sums up our aims. Riverside Bridge School delivers outcomes significantly above the national average for pupils with special needs on all key measures; we support development of the personal qualities of confidence and resilience essential for a successful life, and support development of the skills and strategies for lifelong learning and independent living within the community.

Riverside Bridge School makes full use of the freedoms its status brings through an innovative and personalised curriculum that suits the needs of all its pupils. The school’s governance arrangements enable fast, flexible decision-making at school level, enabling resources to be used efficiently and effectively to continually raise achievement.

We believe in a provision which provides high quality learning opportunities, teaching and facilities for all, whilst rigorously tailoring learning to meet the distinctive needs of different groups of pupils. Our unified learning campus will ensure pupils are able to achieve their full potential, access the mainstream facilities and experience a wide range of appropriate challenges.

Our curriculum model is distinctive in the offering of three clear pathways, differentiated by the teaching and learning requirements of each of our pupil groups. We believe our three distinct and differentiated pathways offers the best way for:

• Achievement to be maximised

• Each pupil to have a personalised curriculum appropriate to their needs

• Teachers to deliver lessons at an appropriate pace

• Expectations and targets to be set and reinforced

• Pupils to be challenged and supported at the right level

• A positive learning environment to be nurtured and maintained

• Pupils to develop confidence and self-esteem

• Pastoral programmes to be appropriately differentiated

The ASC (ASD) Pathway.

At Riverside Bridge School, knowledge about autism and the learning styles of pupils with autistic spectrum conditions informs, and is fundamental to, the development of effective strategies for their teaching and learning. The components of effective teaching and learning for pupils with ASC Riverside Bridge School include: 

• Teaching informed by the principles of structured teaching (TEACCH)

• High levels of organisation and structure in the physical environment to assist understanding and meaning;

• Schedules and work systems to ensure the sequence of daily activities are predictable and understandable;

• Visual supports to make individual tasks and curriculum understandable

• Programmes based on individualised assessment and the functional level of each pupil with intervention drawing on existing skills and interests; 

• Emphasis on development of independence.

The PMLD Pathway.

At Riverside Bridge School the complex learning needs of learners with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) are recognised. In addition to very severe learning difficulties they may have, other significant difficulties, such as physical disabilities, sensory impairment or severe medical conditions are provided for. The components of effective teaching and learning for PMLD pupils at Riverside Bridge Special School include strategies which: 

• take account of preferred sensory and learning channels and ways of processing information; 

• focus on early communication, cognitive and sensory skills that are the foundation to all future learning and crucial to an improved quality of life; 

• support emotional well-being sustained by interactive approaches where learning is contingent on good personal relationships, repetition, familiarity, predictability and sensitivity to feedback from the learner. 

The SLD Pathway.

At Riverside Bridge School fundamental to, the development of effective strategies for teaching learners with severe learning difficulties (SLD) is the understanding that they require many of the same teaching principles and strategies relevant to all learners albeit teaching that is more intensive and explicit to accommodate to different patterns and degrees of difficulty in learning. The components of effective teaching and learning for SLD pupils at Riverside Bridge School include strategies which offer:

• More experience in generalising knowledge learnt in one context to other contexts 

• More examples to learn concepts 

• More explicit teaching of learning strategies & reinforcement of them 

• More frequent and more specific assessment of learning 

• More time to solve problems 

• More careful checking for preparedness for the next stage of learning 

• More practice to achieve mastery