Pastoral
Our Vision
Orchardside welcomes all learners who have found themselves at this particular stage in their educational journey. We recognise that often complex and multiple factors contribute to a permanent exclusion. Orchardside takes a holistic approach to working with our learners to identify and overcome these entrenched barriers to healthy social, emotional, moral and educational development. At the core of our philosophy and vision, is the notion that relationships are central to personal empowerment and transformative potential in our young people. We believe that positive and nurturing relationships are needed to be built and sustained with our learners. Everything else, teaching, leading, mentoring and managing, is done within these confines. We aim to support each student by providing a learning experience that is rich and dynamic. This is part of our commitment to finding the best ways of supporting, inspiring and motivating our students to revitalise their relationship with learning. Our primary purpose is to re-integrate students back to mainstream through our Local Authority’s Fair Access Panel. We achieve this through careful assessment, planning, monitoring and reviewing of our student’s progress at Orchardside. Students who are not in a position to reintegrate into mainstream, benefit from a rich and dynamic curriculum or are considered for a specialist school placement via an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP).
Key Principles and Philosophy
The key principle and philosophy underpinning our behaviour for learning policy is restorative justice and restorative approaches. These operate parallel to a punitive model of sanctions and rewards. A restorative approach is a meta-cognitive model of behaviour management. It assists all staff at Orchardside with the management of disruptive behaviour in the classroom, and in collaboration with the teacher, supports students to reflect on and problem-solve breaches of our school’s Charter of Rights and Values. By using restorative approaches, Orchardside recognises the powerful potential of personal narrative in creating identity, understanding, respect and creating a climate of care.
By basing our behaviour policy on restorative principles of inclusion, the repair of harm, reintegration that is reinforced by nurturing relationships, we believe that our learners will be empowered to:
- acknowledge any wrong doing
- offer proposals to repair any harm that was caused
- co-produce their own plan for their educational journey
- seek support for themselves, their family and others affected by the harm that was caused
- have a more personalised approach to understanding their behaviour
- learn by modelling
- reintegrate into a learning community
Consistency is an important feature of school life. In restorative models, consistency does not always mean automatic behavioural consequences to behaviours. Rather, consistency in restorative practices is captured in the approach to behaviour. It is Orchardside’s commitment to consistently apply the principles of restorative justice and restorative thinking in our approach to behaviour.
