The Orchard Rationale

What are the aims of the SEND provision at Woodland Community Primary School?

Woodland is an inclusive school, where all of the teachers adapt their teaching and therefore learning using Quality First teaching.

The Orchard is a bespoke specialist provision unit that caters for pupils within KS1 with significant special educational and learning needs and disabilities. Pupils are selected to work within The Orchard on a needs basis. Provision within The Orchard follows the whole school curriculum offer and is adapted to meet the needs of pupils who need a high level of differentiation.

Within The Orchard, all of the teachers and teaching assistants support pupils with special educational needs and disabilities. Our aims are:

• To deliver an inclusive curriculum that is engaging, safe and fun for all.
• To ensure that every pupil with special educational needs and/or disabilities make the best progress possible.
• To foster and promote effective working partnerships with parents and carers, pupils and outside agencies.
• To listen to the voice of all pupils.

The Orchard Provision

The Orchard provision is broad and balanced, enabling all pupils to understand the relevance and importance of an appropriate education. This promotes self-esteem and confidence that leads to all pupils making progress. The Orchard is led by the school’s SENDCo.

Teachers use a wide range of strategies to meet pupil’s needs. Lessons have clear learning challenges and steps to success and differentiated appropriately and assessed to inform the next stage of learning.

The curriculum and learning environment may be adapted by:

• Small groups that target specific levels of progress.
• Differentiated resources and teaching styles.
• Appropriate choice of texts and topics to suit the learner.
• Access arrangements for tests and examinations.
• Additional adult support.
• Tailored interventions lead by adults bespoke to the pupil’s needs.

The Orchard will utilise recommendations from external agencies (e.g. Educational Psychologist, Speech and Language Therapists, Rochdale Additional Needs Service).

How will my child be included in activities outside of The Orchard including trips and Sports Day?

Pupils within The Orchard continue to be linked to a registration class. Pupils will spend parts of their day with their registration classes to ensure that the school continues to be inclusive of a range of need within the cohort. Children may access their registration classes through:

• Class registers and Morning Work.
• Physical Education.
• Music.
• Enrichment activities.
• Sports Day.

All pupils within The Orchard will have the opportunity to review their time within provision. This will be completed in collaboration with the Inclusion Team and parents/carers. This will be adapted to meet the individual needs of each pupil.

Orchard Curriculum at Woodland

The curriculum in Orchard is based on providing child-centred, individualised learning opportunities for all children through a play-based provision. We use the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework to inform and guide our delivery of the 6 areas of learning: Communication, Language and Literacy, Mathematical Development, Personal, Social and Emotional Development, Physical Development, Understanding of the World and Expressive Arts and Design.

Before children can develop their knowledge and understanding of all six areas of learning, they work on our Explorer Curriculum consisting of communication development, physical development, cognitive development and personal, social and emotional development.

The delivery of the curriculum is based around learning through play to engage children with active learning, exploration and becoming a critical thinker; in line with their year group project to ensure breadth and balance of learning. We base children’s individualised curriculum and goals around the outcomes in their EHCP and/or IEP to ensure that learning is relevant and personalised.

Communication, Language and Literacy

One of our core objectives throughout the Orchard room is to provide children with a purposeful and effective means to communicate. If children are given the opportunity and a means to communicate, they can achieve! We work closely with experienced Speech and Language Therapists and Rochdale Additional Needs ‘Talk to Learn’ Team who provide training for our staff, enabling our children to receive appropriate support and teaching strategies throughout their school day.

Our school library provides a rich learning environment full of a variety of different books to meet every reader’s interest and need. Reading is an essential, transferable life-skill and it is important that every pupil at Woodland Community Primary is provided with the opportunity to learn to read at a level that is suitable, achievable and enriching for them. Strategies used to teach reading are tailored to each individual child’s need, and for those ready to use a structure phonics approach, we use ‘Little Wandle’.

Cognition/Mathematical Development

In mathematical development, we aim to teach our curriculum though a range of functional exploration skills. We include lots of problem solving in play and real life situations. The children in the Orchard enjoy taking part in Heuristic Play; this supports the development of motor skills, critical thinking and creativity using real life, natural objects.

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

In PSED, our children are encouraged to participate in a variety of activities that promote self-confidence, wellbeing and being actively involved in the world around them. We have some relaxing yoga and meditation activities and myHappymind, which while being fun, allow children to feel peace, joy and fulfilment. We promote independence as much as possible through real life experiences such as cooking where the children have opportunities to develop their self-help and life skills. We have input from Occupational Therapists who support our children to access all of these self-help activities.

Physical Development

We have individualised targets to support children with their physical development. We have regular input from Rochdale Additional Needs teach who give training and advice on maintaining or increasing levels of balance and mobility, whist providing specialist equipment where needed.

Children in the Orchard also have the opportunity to take part in the daily mile, two Physical Education sessions per week and Forest School to continue to motivate our children to move and keep healthy. 

Understanding of the World

We aim to provide the children in the Orchard with lots of outdoor learning opportunities; we find that children can develop their curiosity about the world when they are motivated, engaged and actively learning.

We have many long term links in our local community. Some of the children are taking part in extra-curricular activities and Sensory circuit Breakfast club; we visit the library and aim to have regular visits to the shop to practice buying healthy snack items for the classroom.

Religious Education, people and communities, technology and the world are all covered through this curriculum area.

Expressive Arts and Design

We love being creative whenever we can and we promote this through our weekly music and dance sessions. The children love to take part in performances and show their skills to each other. We aim to get an artist into Orchard to support us to think creatively and complete larger scale artwork and movements. We have a designated art section of our classroom, which we use for regular DT and woodwork sessions as well as creating immersive spaces for creative exploration.