Lime Hills will create an environment, a workforce and a curriculum experience which enables children and young people with social, emotional and mental health difficulties to develop the skills, resilience and self-awareness to be successful in later life. Combining a knowledge of research in neuroplasticity with utilisation of the natural physical environment, creative and therapeutic opportunities, children at Lime Hills will be supported to develop self-regulation and a broader window of tolerance in their daily life so that they can access the very best academic opportunities at their point of readiness. Each child will have a different range of needs and hence a different range of opportunities and therapies, and the curriculum will be designed around an understanding of the individual: no two curricula will look the same. The design of the school day and staffing structure will support children to access learning through being more regularly in optimum arousal stage: this will be enabled by ensuring children are attached or allocated to three key staff, helping them to build relationships over time and enabling them to feel safe and thrive, even in the face of change.
The small number of people working with each individual enables optimal arousal to learn, without the vulnerability associated with ensuring trusted connections with only one adult. The setting will have a range of carefully designed spaces which will enable group interaction, safe spaces for retreat, those which facilitate academic learning and those which are more therapeutic in nature. The day will involve routine and structure which creates a feeling of safety, without the rigidity of a mainstream setting: staff will be trained and empowered to deviate from routine where appropriate to help an individual to make progress socially, emotionally or academically whilst maintaining the very highest expectations. Lime Hills meets the needs of those most in need of specialist intervention. In time, we aim to serve a broader educational community of schools in North Somerset who can be better empowered to meet the social and emotional needs of their cohorts, including those who struggle more than most. Being part of the CLF gives us resilience and a robustness that is not found in standalone settings nor in smaller multi-academy trusts.
This is underpinned by the core HEART values of the CLF, namely to:
The CLF curriculum intent is as appropriate for Lime Hills as for every other setting: enabling children to understand their place in the world, which they exploit because of a developed sense of self and agency that is built on an ability to seek meaning and make connections based on evolving understanding secured through a foundation of knowledge and skills. Through effective links with mainstream settings coupled with highly specialised approaches designed to meet individual child needs, Lime Hills will provide a curriculum that enables academic success and personal growth.
Lime Hills is part of a family of schools in the CLF North Somerset Cluster:
Broadoak Academy
Hans Price Academy
Haywood Village Academy in Weston-super-Mare
Herons’ Moor Academy
Winterstoke Hundred Academy (formerly NSETC)
Children at all levels will be expected to engage in a fit-for-purpose interpretation of the usual curriculum for their age and stage.
An understanding of the varying and complex needs of young people will underpin the design of the provision. The provision will utilise offsite and outdoor spaces and will be multi-disciplinary. This will allow the provision to personalise and meet needs according to the individual needs of the child concerned.
Specialist teachers, teaching assistants, therapists and mentors will lead the work in Social Emotional and Mental Health, based on one site but with flexibility to visit and support other sites where children will benefit from similar approaches adopted by non-specialist staff, for example Youth Offending Team workers, Family Intervention Workers, Youth Workers, Police, Social Workers and so on.
Children will be expected to make at least good progress, first in accessing the curriculum and then in moving through it stage by stage.
Children will study a range of personalised pathways. They may access the provision during the school holidays as well as during term time, allowing them to increase their rates of progress but also ensuring safety at times when a mainstream school is closed. This exceptional level of flexibility will allow children with a range of needs to find a place, space and time to have them met, allowing them to make more progress overall.
Once within the school setting children follow a personalised curriculum including therapeutic approaches with more traditional content and methods. On one hand children will be developing self-awareness, emotional regulation, window of tolerance and vagal tone whilst undertaking specific interventions aimed at developing social and emotional capabilities and enabling vocational and academic success. The unique setting of the school enables each child to have an allotment for which they are responsible, and in the course of any given day, children may engage in any number of activities and therapies: horticulture and outdoor cookery, forest school and bushcraft skills, pottery, painting and craft, creating garden furniture and decorations (for onward sale) catering, caring for animals, parenting, enterprise.
