Our dedicated Inclusion Team identify and coordinate support to ensure that the individual, holistic needs of our children are met enabling all our learners to flourish and achieve higher than they thought possible. Support is allocated in collaboration with parents, carers and outside agencies and provided not only for the child but their families too.

Children who require additional support receive this from both teaching and support staff in the classroom and through targeted interventions. A variety of interventions are offered to support learning including targeted support sessions delivered by experienced staff.  Many of our intervention programmes are guided by the expertise of external agencies that we work in close partnership with.

We recognise that the Social, Emotional and Mental Health development of our children is fundamental to learning. To support this, we have a nurture room and a team of committed Learning Mentors who work with identified children to support them in developing friendships, building confidence and self-esteem and to promote positive behaviour.  

Our Learning Mentors run a quiet lunch where children can eat in quiet spaces rather than being in the hustle and bustle of the dining hall.

At Moorside Primary School we use the Zones of Regulation throughout the school.  We want to teach all our children good coping and regulation strategies so they can help themselves when they experience stress and anxiety.  Throughout life and in the classroom, children can sometimes panic when faced with a tricky learning problem of life challenge.  By teaching them how to cope with these feelings might make them better at tackling learning challenges and build better resilience so they don’t give up so easily when faced with difficulty.

We want children at Moorside to grow into successful teenagers then adults. Teaching the children at a young age about managing their feelings will support them in later life so that they don’t turn to negative coping strategies which affect their mental and physical wellbeing.

We aim to help children to:

• Recognise when they are in the different Zones and learn how to change or stay in the Zone they are in.
• Increase their emotional vocabulary so they can explain how they are feeling.  Recognise when other people are in different Zones, thus developing better empathy.
• Develop an insight into what might make them move into the different Zones.
• Understand that emotions, sensory experiences such as lack of sleep or hunger and their environment might influence which Zone they are in.
• Develop problem-solving skills and resilience
• Identify a range of calming and alerting strategies that support them (known as their personal ‘toolkit’.

Supplementary to this, we have in place a key worker system.  Key workers are assigned to children who may require some extra social or emotional support. Our dedicated key workers speak with their child each day, giving them time to talk about any concerns or worries that they may have.