Chances Educational Support Services

Overview: Chances Educational Support Services is a short-term alternative education provision for pupils who are at risk of exclusion or struggling in their mainstream schools. The school provides a supportive environment where pupils can reintegrate back into mainstream education. The school has a successful approach to working with pupils who have struggled in their previous schools, with staff getting to know pupils on an individual level and providing well-established routines that give pupils predictability.

Strengths:

• Pupils feel understood and settle in quickly due to staff getting to know them on an individual level.
• Staff make breaktimes friendly and sociable occasions, providing a safe space for pupils to talk to and share any worries with staff.
• Pupils rise to the school's high expectations of how to learn and behave, with staff carefully guiding pupils to understand their behaviours and self-regulate their feelings.
• Pupils study a broad and ambitious curriculum, with a high level of individual support that allows them to catch up on missed learning, ask questions, and gain qualifications without the fear of failure.
• The school fosters pupils' personal and social skills well, with character development running through all aspects of school life.

Areas to improve:

• The culture of reading is not fully embedded, with pupils having too few chances to read across the whole curriculum, preventing them from building a love of reading and improving their confidence and fluency.
• In a few subjects, the school has not identified or mapped out the most important knowledge it wants pupils to learn, making it difficult for pupils to build up a rich body of knowledge.

Safeguarding: The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.