Southbourne Infant School

Southbourne Infant School is proud of its reputation for valuing each child as an individual and seeking to develop self esteem and confidence. We have a very experienced staff who are all dedicated to providing an environment where children are given opportunities to learn through a variety of learning styles. We have a team of SEN staff who support children in a variety of ways. These include support for literacy and numeracy, emotional literacy, speech and language, social communication and interaction, physical difficults and co-ordination difficulties. The school has recently been awarded Dyslexia Friendly School status and has been part of a pilot for Speech and Language Friendly School status. We are the first school in West Sussex to be awarded the gold standard for Developmental Co-ordination Disorder status.

Over the past few years, SEN resources have been high on our list of priorities and we now have an excellent high quality resource base. We have our own room for small group and individual work and also support children in class where appropriate. The school runs its own emotional literacy programme which reinforces our school ethos of learning to value and care for ourselves and others. We work with a variety of different programmes to support children at different levels of literacy and have a wide choice of reading books and literacy activities to cover a range of interests and abilities. Similar programmes are in place for numeracy. We have a variety of programmes to encourage attention and listening, receptive and expressive language and motor development.

SEN staff work with a variety of outside agencies including Educational Psychology, Speech and Language Therapy, Inclusion Support, Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy. SEN and classroom support staff are experienced in carrying out specific individual programmes and have been trained in a variety of areas including social communication and speech and language. We have teaching and support staff who have had extensive experience of teaching and supporting children on the autistic spectrum, with Aspergers Syndrome and with speech and language difficulties. We have also had a number of pupils in school with physical difficulties and co-ordination difficulties and with a diagnosis of ADHD.

We pride ourselves on our relationship with parents and carers. There are regular invitations to come in to school to discuss progress and Individual Education Plans where appropriate. An 'open house' policy is in place for parents to discuss any worries or issues. We believe that every child deserves equal opportunities and seek to provide this through our own expertise and liaison with specialist support agencies, where appropriate. We endeavour to ensure that we send our children on to KS2 with a positive attitude towards each other, themselves and to learning.