Specialist Resourced Provision for
Children with SEMH at
Bowker Vale Primary School
The Specialist Support Centre (SSC) is the North primary specialist provision for children with Education and Health Care plans for social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) difficulties. We provide and deliver specialised and personalised teaching for up to nine children in a purpose built building. Places are allocated by the Local Authority with admissions normally occurring in September.
Staffing in the provision is usually our Assistant Head (and Specialist Leader of Education that delivers the outreach support), a teacher and three teaching assistants. Children are usually taught Maths and English in the morning, either in small groups or individually. Science and other subjects, such as history and geography are taught as discrete subjects weekly.
In the afternoons, children work on developing their skills in other areas of the national curriculum such as PE, design and technology and art. Throughout the school day, the children are supported in developing their social skills and are taught self regulation strategies to develop their own emotional responses to situations as they arise. Our approach towards supporting behaviour is relational. The SSC team are trained in using 'The Zones of Regulation' which is our primary approach to supporting children to either self regulate or to regulate with additional adult support.
As a Rights Respecting school we are proud that all our children have the opportunity to develop their talents and to develop their freedom of expression.
Children in the SSC class have opportunities to join in with their mainstream peers as and when appropriate. All children in the SSC have an opportunity to join in with their year group for Forest School. Children also have opportunities to play with their peers on the mainstream playground as and when this is appropriate.
Our work is supported by access to an Educational Psychologist every term.
Outreach Offer to schools in North Manchester - information for Professionals
As we consolidate the excellent practice of our SSC, since April 2020, the Local Authority are able to support our capacity to offer funded outreach to our local schools in the North of the city, meaning there will be no cost to you for up to 1 day's SEMH support.
If you have a child, children or a group that meets our criteria (see below) and would like to request some support please complete and return the ‘Outreach Request Form’ (see below) and return to – outreach@bowkervale.manchester.sch.uk
Support will be individually tailored to your school. It will always begin with a meeting between you and our lead SEMH teacher (who is also a Specialist Leader of Education for behaviour), to identify the problem and outline what support may look like and what you hope the outcomes to be.
The offer to schools within this project is up to 3 days support. Please can I emphasise that your school’s rationale for accessing support must be to show commitment to the child maintaining their mainstream place and that the child must not have already had support from other provisions.
We look forward to working with you.
