Releasing Potential School

Overview: Releasing Potential School is a highly inclusive school where all pupils have an education, health and care (EHC) plan. The school has a unique approach that supports pupils to settle successfully into the 'releasing potential' environment, and they appreciate the difference it makes to their lives. Pupils feel safe and understand how to keep themselves safe online and in the real world.

Strengths:

• Relationships between staff and pupils are a key strength of the school, with adults using positive relationships to build trust and help pupils develop the knowledge, skills and confidence they need for lifelong learning and future employment.
• The school's core values of love, fun, survival, power and freedom underpin the school's ethos, and pupils feel safe and understand how to keep themselves safe online and in the real world.
• The school's carefully considered curriculum enables pupils to learn at a pace suited to individual needs and starting points, and the focus on outdoor education and learning in the outside environment is pivotal to the school's success.
• Expectations for behaviour are high, and the school successfully supports staff to understand the needs of pupils and how best to support them to build positive relationships.

Areas to improve:

• In some lessons, staff do not always consider how pupils' EHC plan targets can be met alongside the curriculum objectives, which means that pupils do not always achieve as well as they could.
• Some school systems have recently been refined, but these are not yet fully embedded, and staff do not always have a robust understanding of how to implement the agreed processes.

Safeguarding: The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.