Unlocking True Potential With High Quality Education

Ultimately, choosing the right school for a child will be a life changing decision. Ensuring it is a good decision is critical. We know that parents and carers want a high standard of education for their child to make good progress, in an environment where they can be happy and safe.

Prosperity Children’s Services are well known for supporting children and young people, with a range of needs and difficulties to be cared for and well supported in a range of different settings. We embrace our duty to support children to engage in education. Sourcing suitable schools or learning provision has been a huge challenge for us and for local authorities.

Our response was to set up new services to provide outreach and home tuition meaning that individuals can access relevant learning when they are not able to attend school. This has been successful and welcomed by local authorities, yet we know this never going to replace full-time education. It was an obvious decision and natural next step for us to open our first school.

The Willows School has been set up to provide full-time, personalised programmes of learning which will meet individual needs, difficulties, and interests of learners. Our aim is to ensure great educational outcomes for all pupils, including gaining the skills, qualifications, determination, and resilience to succeed in life beyond school.

Our staff team is highly experienced, suitably qualified and trained. Ultimately, they recognise and embrace the challenges associated with supporting pupils who have experienced disrupted education, have gaps in learning and whose needs were not met previously. We make it our business to support our staff team, to ensure their own well-being, so they can work effectively and remain passionate about making the difference.

We know that good quality, relevant education is key to improving pupil progress, personal development, well-being, and overall life chances. Our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum, with some great additions, including careers for all, independence, and enterprise skills. Pupils in each Key Stage can pursue personalised, appropriate programmes of learning, including academic and vocational pathways.

Your decision to choose our school for your child will be supported by us throughout your child’s time at The Willows School. We will work closely with you as parents, carers, and local authorities to help ensure your decision was the right one.

We work collaboratively with our therapy team, being part of the therapeutic web around the child. The enhances our trauma informed and trauma responsive approach, building a safe and secure environment for our children to be able to access learning. We incorporate principles from the PACE model (Hughes 1997), further enhancing our trauma informed and attachment building environment; promoting ‘connection before correction’ to enable our children to engage in situations with more tolerance. Also maintaining our child-centred focus (Rogers 1957), weaving in acceptance, congruence and a belief in each of our children to achieve to their full ability.

Our psychotherapists attend each child’s Child Looked After (CLA) reviews, and Personalised Education Plan (PEP) reviews in line with the needs of the child, having input into risk assessments and positive behaviour support plans. Relevant information is gathered by the therapist, and a personalised, targeted therapy plan is formulated.

Much of our work begins by developing safe, secure relationships with each child, our therapy team work alongside our education team to enhance these relationships and offer pre-therapy work (Prouty 2002), created for those who have challenges in psychological contact and connection. This is with an aim to offer 1:1 direct work when a child is ready in line with the therapy plan. Our therapy team also deliver in-house training to up-skill us as a whole team in response to our pupils needs.

Please do contact us at any time, we look forward to meeting you.