The Bridge School is an all-through school for pupils with severe learning challenges and complex needs. Many of our pupils have ASD and many are pre-verbal. Our specialism is communication as we believe this is the greatest skill we can help our pupils develop so that they go on to live enjoyable and fruitful lives. Our Creative Curriculum incorporates the key elements that we believe are most important for our students to learn and experience during their time with us: the skills that will be most important to them in adulthood.

Communication is the key development strand at The Bridge School and broadly refers to the teaching and learning within the strands of ‘reading’, ‘communication’ and ‘writing’. We adopt a holistic and creative approach in delivering these strands, with an underlying emphasis on fostering the development of children’s communication skills.

Literacy at early development is focused on supporting the fundamental building blocks to early communication. For many of our children who are pre-text readers, this means learning to read symbols, gestures and signs and link them to meaning, developing an appreciation for rhythm and tone of words, while some of our children benefit from phonics training. This area of the curriculum offers a breadth of stimulating literacy experiences that aim to capture and sustain children’s curiosity and interest, develop their comprehension skills and nurture the capacity for symbolic and imaginative thinking. High quality text and genres are used to support learning and promote a love of stories and books. The key is to provide pupils with the most vital skills of being able to understand and be understood.

Subjects provide the interesting and enriching vehicles through which to deliver skills learning, thus the key learning points are threaded through all subjects as is communication.

Our intention is that pupils are offered a range of qualification and accreditation opportunities which reflect their interests and abilities. We work with a range of awarding organisations to ensure that we offer accreditation which is nationally recognised and robustly assessed.

Some of the accreditation offered to our pupils include:

• OCR Life and Living Skills
• ASDAN Towards Independence
• ASDAN Transition Challenge
• Arts Council Awards

As children move towards adulthood, we work with a range of post 16 providers to support your child with their transition when they leave school at the end of year 11. We aim to offer children the opportunity to visit providers and develop their understanding of adult life. This is supported through the annual review process as well as through planned classroom learning.