00:00 Hello, my name is Mark Bebeck and I'm the new Head Teacher of Cortland's Independent Special School.
00:05 We've had the joy of opening the school today on March the 1st,
00:09 ably supported by the Lord Mayor.
00:13 We are a school for children with additional needs, children who have
00:18 autism, Asperger's,
00:22 high-functioning autism,
00:24 children with ADHD, specific learning difficulties, children with social emotional mental health issues,
00:30 children who have been absent from school for a long time and who are struggling to get back into
00:37 large group settings in mainstreams.
00:39 It's vital that a school like ours is part of the local offer.
00:44 The ability for the local authority to place children in West Sussex, particularly in the Worthing area,
00:51 is in a negative value, which means that children can't find places.
00:56 And us coming on board as a new school allows them to ease some of the pressure that they've been having.
01:03 It's keen for us to build the school slowly and with a sense of
01:09 direction, which means that we are
01:12 bringing on board a cohort of children who are mixed, girls and boys,
01:17 and who are in the age range of Key Stage 3, which is 11 to 14.
01:22 These children
01:25 will start and will have the privilege of being in this wonderful provision,
01:29 and hopefully they take on board and grab that opportunity,
01:33 allow themselves to work with us because it's a two-way partnership.
01:38 We're here to help the children and we want the children to want to come along, to want to
01:45 start beginning to enjoy school again, to start
01:48 enthusing about education so that we can support them in developing their knowledge base and their skills,
01:56 finding their interests,
01:58 riding and running with those interests to a point where they can give back to society
02:04 in a way that at the moment they probably can't see they can.
02:10 Helping the children helps the parents. The parents are under pressure, they're having to look after the children probably at home,
02:17 or they're dealing with a lot of
02:19 fragmented schooling, which means they're in school for a day and back out again, or they're in for
02:24 three or four months and they're back out with an exclusion, that sort of thing.
02:28 So we are keen to get this right. We're incredibly
02:33 passionate about this project. It's been ongoing for well over two years now.
02:39 It's taken a huge financial input from the proprietor, Mr. Zaleki,
02:45 well in excess of a million pounds in getting us to the point that we are now.
02:49 And he continues to be committed financially to supporting the school and helping its growth.
02:55 We are working very closely with local authorities.
02:57 The local authorities will be placing children with us. All the children that come to
03:02 Cortlands will have an educational health care plan.
03:06 It's vital that parents understand that we won't be accepting children unless the local authority are on board with our placement.
03:14 So it's vital that they work with their teams to
03:18 highlight
03:20 Cortlands as a potential, and then for the local authorities to say yes or no that this is a
03:24 place that they feel is a good fit for them.
03:27 Once we do that, the referral system is one in which we will work with the parents who know the children best,
03:35 understand how best to get a child back into the school, show them around, give them a sense of
03:40 you know, give them a sense that this is their school, allow them to come in and feel what it's like and then hopefully get
03:47 them back on board and in a full-time education.
03:49 We're following the national curriculum, so we'll be offering all of the national curriculum subjects. Our aim is with any other school is
03:58 external examinations, which is GCSEs.
04:00 We can go up or down depending on
04:05 the needs of the child.
04:07 And every child will have a bespoke pathway, something that allows them to
04:12 see the reason why they're doing education.
04:16 We all remember being in school where we went in and
04:20 and
04:21 you know, what am I doing this for? Am I ever going to use it?
04:25 Sometimes you're never going to use it, but actually you're learning to learn and if we can get the learning to learn bit with
04:33 what about if we learn a bit more about this, it'll help you do something else.
04:36 Then they see the focus, then they can see an idea of why they're in schools.
04:40 There'll be an awful lot of adult support in the school, both
04:45 teachers and teaching assistants, as well as professionals which will run to clinical psychologists,
04:52 occupational therapists and various other professionals.
04:56 And
04:57 hopefully in sort of five or six years time the school will be
05:02 at its zenith and will be a school that is recognised as a school that is
05:08 professionally
05:12 at the top of its game.
05:13 We'd love to be a school where other
05:16 other professionals came into, took ideas from us and then went back and instigated those in their schools.
05:23 Where our teachers could go out and give support to other
05:27 mainstream schools and other schools in the locale to give them ideas of how we're doing that.
05:34 That's our vision. That's a sort of five, six year vision, but it's something that we're very keen to work towards.
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