Our Nightingale Hub - Catch Up Funding: An example

Nurture and the principles of nurture have always been central to the ethos at St. John’s. All staff have been carefully recruited to support Senior Leaders in enabling children to overcome emotional barriers and successfully access learning at whatever level is appropriate to them at that particular time.

Following closure of schools to all except key workers in March, we, like all other schools remained in close contact with our families, in particular those with additional needs or potentially vulnerable. During the pandemic we further developed relationships with parents and carers to a level where they would approach us if they were having difficulties or needed support themselves. It soon became apparent that we would have a significant number of children, who for whatever reason, could present as school refusers, need extra nurturing and emotional support or just not be ready for the structure and routine of everyday “new normal”.

We decided to set up our Nightingale Hub as a bubble to support those children back into school, liaising closely with parents we created a safe additional class, staffed by a teacher and with SLT support to facilitate a successful return to school. The aims of our Nightingale Hub are:

• Support a positive return to school.
• Support the period of re-adjustment and help to re-establish relationships with adults and peers.
• Additional provision for morning transition, including time for calming and settling.
• Targeted support to teach mindfulness and breathing techniques.
• Additional focus on well-being and emotion coaching approaches.
• Opportunity to develop emotional literacy and strategies for self-regulation.
• Intervention to re-establish and develop essential learning skills of memory and recall.
• Clear structure and routine and help rebuild concentration and focus through ‘chunked’ learning.
• Focus on individualised programmes for key learning in Maths, reading, spelling and grammar (this will require liaison with and input from class teacher).
• Incorporate classroom learning opportunities in a supported manner (English recovery curriculum, Learning theme and science curriculum).
• Support the transition back into the class.

The Hub is a safe and calm environment with its own entrance, this makes it easier for children with high levels of anxiety to come into school discretely. It is based on the principles of nurture and has input from the Assistant Head for Pastoral and Inclusion on a daily basis to ensure a high level of support for the children. The vision was the children would reintegrate back into their own class after intervention and this could take anything up to a term. Nightingale would then be used more flexibly for emergency places should the need arise. Please find here the area that we focus. 

It has been worth the investment, the children are calmer, more settled and will have a much quicker integration back into the classroom than we thought. This can facilitate the Hub teacher undertaking some targeted interventions in the future.

In photo: Mrs Andrea Eastham (SENDCo) and Mr Scott McKenzie (Teacher delivering the intervention)

Article written by Mr Darren Barrow (Head Teacher)