The Unicorn School (Abingdon) A GSG School

What the school says...

The Unicorn School is a special co-educational day school for children with dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and speech and language difficulties, aged between 6 and 16 years. The Unicorn School offers GCSE education. The Unicorn School provides a nurturing environment in which every child is helped to build self-confidence, appreciate their learning difficulties and develop their own personal learning style. The school has achieved accreditation status from CReSTeD and from the children's communication charity ICAN.

The classes are small, with a maximum of 12 pupils and every child receives at least half an hour of daily individual tuition. There is a speech therapist and an occupational therapist on site.

Educational needs are met in various ways. The primary target is to enable the pupil to attain the necessary skills and strategies to make academic progress and to achieve success in their future education. This is done by intensive, specialist teaching of reading, mathematics, writing, spelling and study skills.

The National Curriculum is appropriately differentiated for our children, with emphasis on learning through activity, discussion and multi-sensory techniques.

It is a vital tool in our teaching methods and touch-typing is taught from the outset, this is particularly valuable for children who find the physical act of writing a struggle and yet can still produce excellently presented work. It is important that children's spelling can reach a level where the spell checker can be accessed easily. There is a computer suite, laptops available, a computer in every 1:1 room and speech recognition and other specialist educational software available.

Interested parents are assured of a warm welcome when they come to visit The Unicorn School, where they may see the school in action and discuss their child's strengths and learning difficulties.

Children come to The Unicorn School at varying stages of their education. Clearly it is best for the child to receive help as early as possible, before avoidance habits set in, but it is never too late to start. When children move on from The Unicorn School, not only have they acquired literacy skills and learning strategies to help them to go on to achieve their full academic potential, but they have also learned something else of great value - they have discovered that even if a task, such as reading or writing, seems impossibly difficult, all that is required is hard work, practice, patience and a willingness to try out different approaches to the problem, until one is found that works for that individual child. ...Read more

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