About the Bilbrough Country Classroom - Our Main Ethos

The Bilbrough Country Classroom seeks to offer high quality provision for students with a statement of special educational needs or otherwise that names EOTAS arrangements as part of their provision in part 4 of the statement and students who require an alternative form of provision to meet their needs. The Classroom caters for students between the ages of 11 through to 16. We are located in the village of Bilbrough in North Yorkshire and have a fully equipped classroom able to cater for up to six students per day.

The Bilbrough Country Classroom also has approximately 8 acres of orchards and paddocks where our horse and ponies are kept as well as our 21 free range chickens. Students who take up a place with us are expected to take responsibility for these animals as well as our many varied small animals and 2 Jack Russell dogs. Such animal husbandry is carried out in a very controlled and safe environment.

The Bilbrough Country Classroom is staffed by 3 qualified individuals, 1 fully qualified teacher with extensive experience of dealing with children with severe emotional and behavioural difficulties and 2 T.A’s one of whom has extensive pastoral and behavioural experience from working in a mainstream secondary school for 6 years.

The Bilbrough Country Classroom’s main ethos is to offer an understanding, caring and safe environment where the fostering of good relationships between adults and children and their peers is paramount. To provide an education to children with severe emotional and behavioural difficulties and to utilise every thing the country side has to offer in order to help these individuals manage to get themselves back on track and to give them a sense of purpose and self belief and to hopefully make them effective members of society.

The Bilbrough Country Classroom seeks to prevent students from becoming disaffected and to restore a sense of trust between to adults and children. This is done through trying to understand the student and to earn their respect and not command it. We would like to sum up our work as being that of “Love and limits”. To have students with severe emotional and behavioural difficulties operate within boundaries but also realise that what they do has a sense of purpose and that they achieve many things with us that are worth celebrating, this is achieved through positive re-enforcement and affirmation and offering rewards for effort both curricular and extra curricular.

For older students we seek to prepare them for adult life by helping them gain practical skills as well as helping them with their basic education. As our students have spent large amounts of time excluded from the classroom they often work at well below age expected levels. We seek to help them gain further knowledge and understanding of the core curricular subjects, notably Literacy and Numeracy but also offer other subjects such as art, technology, and humanities. For longer term students we seek to provide a curriculum that compliments the curriculum they would get in school. However due to the size of the provision we cannot offer a full P.E curriculum, practical science or elements of the design and technology syllabus.

We are however working closely with partner schools within the local area to be able to offer opportunities to access parts of the curriculum that we don’t currently offer.

As each day is different and our students can be extremely challenging, flexibility is key to our approach in all areas. This may well involve having to hold off on a lesson or a piece of practical work in order to do something else. On the flip side of this, we may well begin an exercise that isn’t planned in order to maximise the learning opportunity for the students.

The Bilbrough Country Classroom has the following policies available for parents on request:

• Health and Safety
• School Trips
• Behaviour
• Anti-Bullying
• First Aid
• Complaints Procedure
• Child protection and safeguarding
• Accessibility and improvement plan
• Curriculum

A copy of our Child Protection and Safeguarding policy will be sent out to parents whose child has been given a place on the provision.

In Conclusion we seek to offer a caring and understanding environment in which we are utilising the countryside as a vast and valuable resource in order to help our students develop a sense of responsibility and self worth and to become effective members of society.