At Heltwate School we believe children learn best when, 

  • they are engaged and build on prior learning 
  • they feel comfortable, safe and secure and know what staff expect of them 
  • The learning environment and differentiated tasks match their needs 
  • Staff have the skills and understanding to respond to their needs for successful learning to take place with pupils. 
  • Individual support from staff who are empathic and understanding of their needs and abilities ● they have access to multi disciplinary teams if required e.g. physiotherapy, speech and language, occupational therapy and medical teams 
  • teaching and learning opportunities match their individual needs, motivators and interests. 
  • respond and concrete experiences with actual meaning 
  • access to a variety of meaningful, hands on strategies to record their own learning 
  • opportunities to demonstrate that they understand the context of their learning and how to improve it 
  • targets that are set appropriately and are shared with them 
  • opportunities to develop their independent learning

Assessment is at the  heart of effective planning, teaching and personalised learning. Teachers analyse pupils’ progress during each lesson which then informs their planning for individual pupils for future lesson content. Children are involved where appropriate in their own self-assessment of lessons and take part in peer assessment of others’ work. 

Assessments take place daily, staff use evidence from the students’ work and upload it to out assessment platform ‘Earwig’ against the individual target the pupils is working on. As a school, we can then track at an individual, group, class, year group, key stage and whole school level. This information is used to identify pupils who need to be targeted for intervention and additional support. We use ‘Earwig’ as an evidence collection tool for children engaging in learning and social activities. This software is designed so that we can capture the students taking part in learning and link this directly as evidence against their individual outcomes. and then show evidence to parents through online access and end of year reports. 

New students to Heltwate are assessed on entry into Heltwate School by their class teacher. This will identify the level that students are currently working in core subject areas and will inform which Curriculum journey they will take. 

Effort grades are given to children at the end of each lesson on a scale of 1 -5, (5 being outstanding, 1 needing improvement). This allows us to give feedback to the children about how engaged they are in their learning and how hard they are trying. This is recorded by the class teacher and then reported home to parents/carers termly.