Therapy, Intervention and Enrichment

Newlands Academy are pioneering in their psychological approach with a team of full time assistant psychologists working in the school every day. They are supervised fortnightly by a practising educational psychologists and their role is to work directly with students, staff and parents to implement psychological interventions and advice. Interventions and advice are usually in the areas of literacy, numeracy, comprehensions, anxiety, working memory, language, emotional needs and behavioural difficulties, social and communication skills, attention and concentration and motivation. The assistant psychologists also work with class teachers to implement quality first teaching in class with students based on the Educational Psychologists recommendations, and they can provide additional advice and support to help teachers further access and implement Educational Psychology reports and recommendations. Some of the work they have been involved in this year at Newlands has been creating a restorative practice model, delivering whole staff training, training TA’s to deliver 1:1 intervention, gathering assessment and observation data for EHCP applications, designing a referral process and targeted interventions, parent consultations, 1:1 therapeutic work and developing teaching methods with teachers. One of their most successful pieces of work was the creation of a document called a ‘profile of need’. The document is a combination of the students EHCP, the student’s views, and any input from professionals at Newlands Academy. The document is written in the ‘voice of the child’ supporting the SEND Code of Practice (2014) which emphasises a focus on young people’s voices to be heard in decision making. A profile of need is a one-page document including the student’s views, a summary of their needs and a list of recommended personalised support strategies based on specialist recommendations from their EHCP. The psychological input from the team has been invaluable to developing the whole school provision here at Newlands.