Various levels of academic support are offered at Kolbe Catholic College, dependent upon the nature and level of difficulty a student is facing. At all levels, the aim is to provide the right level of support to allow the student to access curriculum and experience success, while still ensuring that the student is sufficiently challenged in order to realise their potential. At the most basic level, differentiation within the classroom by a skilled classroom teacher may be all that is needed. This might involve teachers providing extra scaffolding for a particular student, breaking a task into smaller chunks and building in regular progress checks, providing paper or visual materials to support information given verbally in class or through a digital space such as a class wiki or iTunes U course as well as extra communication to the parents to help them support the student from home. Beyond that, we offer adjusted curriculum (otherwise known as enrichment), numeracy intervention and literacy intervention.
At all levels of academic support, four main aims remain key. They are:
protecting the student’s sense of self worth and dignity;
engaging the student in the curriculum;
enabling the student to develop and hone core skills required for learning in that particular subject area; and
facilitating the realisation of the student’s potential.
For some students, as their confidence grows, the level of support needed will lessen. For others, their needs will continue throughout their time at Kolbe. Each student’s needs will be continually assessed by the classroom teacher to ensure that only the lowest level of extra support needed is offered, thereby encouraging independence and a sense of responsibility for self and own learning in each student.