Courtlands Independant Special School held it's open day on Friday 1st March, and Headteacher Mark Birbeck spoke to the Worthing Herald about his plans for the school in Goring, over the next five years.
Video SR Staff
Video SR Staff
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Hello, my name is Mark Bebeck and I'm the new Head Teacher of Cortland's Independent Special School.
00:05 We've had the joy of opening the school today on March the 1st,
00:09 ably supported by the Lord Mayor.
00:13 We are a school for children with additional needs, children who have
00:18 autism, Asperger's,
00:22 high-functioning autism,
00:24 children with ADHD, specific learning difficulties, children with social emotional mental health issues,
00:30 children who have been absent from school for a long time and who are struggling to get back into
00:37 large group settings in mainstreams.
00:39 It's vital that a school like ours is part of the local offer.
00:44 The ability for the local authority to place children in West Sussex, particularly in the Worthing area,
00:51 is in a negative value, which means that children can't find places.
00:56 And us coming on board as a new school allows them to ease some of the pressure that they've been having.
01:03 It's keen for us to build the school slowly and with a sense of
01:09 direction, which means that we are
01:12 bringing on board a cohort of children who are mixed, girls and boys,
01:17 and who are in the age range of Key Stage 3, which is 11 to 14.
01:22 These children
01:25 will start and will have the privilege of being in this wonderful provision,
01:29 and hopefully they take on board and grab that opportunity,
01:33 allow themselves to work with us because it's a two-way partnership.
01:38 We're here to help the children and we want the children to want to come along, to want to
01:45 start beginning to enjoy school again, to start
01:48 enthusing about education so that we can support them in developing their knowledge base and their skills,
01:56 finding their interests,
01:58 riding and running with those interests to a point where they can give back to society
02:04 in a way that at the moment they probably can't see they can.
02:10 Helping the children helps the parents. The parents are under pressure, they're having to look after the children probably at home,
02:17 or they're dealing with a lot of
02:19 fragmented schooling, which means they're in school for a day and back out again, or they're in for
02:24 three or four months and they're back out with an exclusion, that sort of thing.
02:28 So we are keen to get this right. We're incredibly
02:33 passionate about this project. It's been ongoing for well over two years now.
02:39 It's taken a huge financial input from the proprietor, Mr. Zaleki,
02:45 well in excess of a million pounds in getting us to the point that we are now.
02:49 And he continues to be committed financially to supporting the school and helping its growth.
02:55 We are working very closely with local authorities.
02:57 The local authorities will be placing children with us. All the children that come to
03:02 Cortlands will have an educational health care plan.
03:06 It's vital that parents understand that we won't be accepting children unless the local authority are on board with our placement.
03:14 So it's vital that they work with their teams to
03:18 highlight
03:20 Cortlands as a potential, and then for the local authorities to say yes or no that this is a
03:24 place that they feel is a good fit for them.
03:27 Once we do that, the referral system is one in which we will work with the parents who know the children best,
03:35 understand how best to get a child back into the school, show them around, give them a sense of
03:40 you know, give them a sense that this is their school, allow them to come in and feel what it's like and then hopefully get
03:47 them back on board and in a full-time education.
03:49 We're following the national curriculum, so we'll be offering all of the national curriculum subjects. Our aim is with any other school is
03:58 external examinations, which is GCSEs.
04:00 We can go up or down depending on
04:05 the needs of the child.
04:07 And every child will have a bespoke pathway, something that allows them to
04:12 see the reason why they're doing education.
04:16 We all remember being in school where we went in and
04:20 and
04:21 you know, what am I doing this for? Am I ever going to use it?
04:25 Sometimes you're never going to use it, but actually you're learning to learn and if we can get the learning to learn bit with
04:33 what about if we learn a bit more about this, it'll help you do something else.
04:36 Then they see the focus, then they can see an idea of why they're in schools.
04:40 There'll be an awful lot of adult support in the school, both
04:45 teachers and teaching assistants, as well as professionals which will run to clinical psychologists,
04:52 occupational therapists and various other professionals.
04:56 And
04:57 hopefully in sort of five or six years time the school will be
05:02 at its zenith and will be a school that is recognised as a school that is
05:08 professionally
05:12 at the top of its game.
05:13 We'd love to be a school where other
05:16 other professionals came into, took ideas from us and then went back and instigated those in their schools.
05:23 Where our teachers could go out and give support to other
05:27 mainstream schools and other schools in the locale to give them ideas of how we're doing that.
05:34 That's our vision. That's a sort of five, six year vision, but it's something that we're very keen to work towards.
05:41 you
05:43 You
05:45 You
05:47 You
05:49 You
05:51 You
05:53 You
05:55 You
05:57 You
05:59 You
06:01 You
06:03 You
06:05 You
06:07 You
06:09 You
06:11 You
06:13 [BLANK_AUDIO]