SEN & Disability Provision

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 defines a disabled person as one who has ‘a physical or mental impairment which has substantial and long-term adverse effect on a person’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities’.

Kingsdown School aims to ensure that appropriate provision is available to enable all students to have equal access to curriculum opportunities and to ensure that the curriculum is differentiated to meet individual learning needs. Every effort is made to provide and accommodate any additional facilities or resources that might be required by disabled students, including the use of special technological aids, enlarged print etc.

Supporting and enabling all students to be effective learners is the responsibility of every member of staff. The Special Educational Needs team work closely with their mainstream colleagues to facilitate the integration of a range of learning activities and differentiated resources into teaching or non-teaching support that may be required. Additional programs are offered supplementary to the regular curriculum, for pupils needing periods of specific intervention. These include, but are not limited to: corrective reading and spelling, secondary circle time, organisational help sessions and speech and language intervention.

Kingsdown has much of its teaching and learning space at ground floor level, and some access ramps and toilet facilities have been installed to those areas. Kingsdown has two lifts providing access to the Virtual Learning Centre (ICT) and to some science laboratories; however, wheel chair users would not be able to gain access to some upper floors.

Some classrooms have less than ideal acoustic properties affecting audibility and teaching for pupils with hearing impairments; the school promotes the improvement of specific facilities known to cause problems with audibility and supports and trains in the use of adaptive technology such as radio microphones.

Kingsdown has an Autistic Spectrum Condition Centre, which was opened in 2003; it has capacity for 15 students and each year is usually oversubscribed.  It is designed for pupils who are academically capable of accessing the mainstream curriculum but need more support than can be offered in a totally mainstream environment. Admission to the centre is through the decision of a panel of professionals and is not controlled by the Kingsdown catchment area restrictions. All students admitted to the centre have a Statement of Special Educational Needs and a diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Condition. The majority of students follow the mainstream curriculum and attend mainstream classes with Teaching Assistant support; however most students are withdrawn from languages so they can use this time to complete homework and also work on developing key skills. Individualised ASDAN, GCSE and reading remediation courses are taught in the centre as this is more appropriate for those students needing some time in the more predictable environment it provides.

As of March 2013 Kingsdown became a Dyslexia Friendly School, and we were revalidated in 2017.

Related Documents

Annual Report to Parents and Carers on the provision for SEND 2018
Annual Report to Parents and Carers on the provision for SEND 2017