Creating a single school community

Case study

Hungerford Primary School and Bridge Special School use a chance co-location to maximise opportunities for children. A ‘mix and match’ approach to resource-sharing helps parents focus on children’s learning.

Key learning

The vision of a handful of individuals can turn an arrangement of convenience – the authority’s plans to locate two entirely separate schools back to back on one site - into a synergistic collaboration in which the identities of the two schools are merged.
It’s not necessary to enter any formal relationship to make this kind of sharing work. The two schools have no joint governance arrangements and are not planning any. In fact the staff and governors of both schools think there is a strength in their separateness and specialism that underpins their shared work.
The joining of the schools offers a significant safety net for Bridge students who can experience mainstream schooling with the assurance that they can return to the support of the Bridge environment if they need to.
Working together helps parents overcome anxieties about having a child in a special school so that their contact with staff can focus on their child’s teaching and learning, not on allaying their fears.

Background

When Islington Local Authority responded to the need for more special school places it unintentionally created a raft of new opportunities for two very different schools led by two dynamic headteachers.

Hungerford Primary School is located in Islington, North London. The original school occupies a typical Victorian school building. The Bridge is a new special school, most of whose pupils have autism or Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD). It has another co-located site for secondary age pupils plus an outreach service.

Key challenges

Breaking through preconceived ideas

The key challenge has been to break down staff and parents’ perceived distinctions between special and mainstream education. Both schools wanted to avoid an ‘us’ and ‘them’ culture.

Solutions

Visible similarity

Unity is symbolically acknowledged through the exterior similarities of the two buildings with the new school utilising the same type of building materials as Hungerford. This strategy was adopted at the express wish of the school’s headteacher.

Twinning

Every class is twinned with a class in the other school. This opens up new opportunities for autistic children on the Hungerford roll and also for Bridge children who have the potential to transfer into Hungerford.

Sharing space

An ‘inclusion classroom’ located in Hungerford, offers breakfast and after-school facilities to Hungerford pupils while also acting as a base for pupils from the Bridge. Hungerford’s special education needs (SEN) pupils use the Bridge’s sensory room and swimming pool.

Sharing planning and resource

Teachers engage in joint planning and joint use of facilities, with children making regular visits to each other’s schools. The schools enjoy economies of scale in combined continuing professional development (CPD) and other activities that enable them to share specialist and mainstream skills and knowledge.

Building a single community

A joint parents’ group helps them overcome their concerns about their children being associated with or taught in a special school. Freedom from anxiety enables families and teachers to focus on teaching and learning issues rather than allaying parental fears.

Next steps

The two schools are happy to retain the flexibility of their voluntary, informal collaboration and have no plans for more formal types of collaboration.

Further information

For further information contact Hungerford Primary School by email at b.bench@hungerford.islington.sch.uk.