Chances Educational Support Services

Overview

Chances Educational Support Services provides short-term alternative education for pupils struggling in mainstream settings, many with special educational needs. The report describes a school where staff build strong individual relationships, helping pupils feel understood and re-engage with learning. Inspectors found that the school successfully supports pupils to improve their behaviour, attendance, and confidence, with a significant majority reintegrating successfully into mainstream education.

Strengths

• Staff use well-established routines, such as morning ‘check ins’, to reduce anxiety and create a safe, sociable environment.
• Pupils display “Outstanding” behaviour and attitudes, rising to high expectations and learning to self-regulate their feelings.
• The curriculum is personalised, allowing pupils to catch up on missed learning at their own pace without the fear of failure.
• The school fosters personal and social skills effectively, with pupils cooperating exceptionally well and engaging in meaningful community projects.
• Parents and feeder schools provide “glowing accounts” of how the school has transformed pupils’ educational experiences.

Areas to improve

• The school must embed a culture of reading across the whole curriculum, as pupils currently have too few opportunities to read, preventing them from building fluency and confidence.
• In a minority of subjects, the school has not identified the most essential knowledge in a coherent way, making it difficult for pupils to build a “rich body of knowledge.”

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective, with robust risk assessments for off-site activities and appropriate mitigations in place.