Inreach provision – Jigsaw Service

What is the Jigsaw Inreach Service?

The Jigsaw Inreach Service is our alternative provision service. We are the day 6 statutory provision that provides bespoke education and support to children who have been permanently excluded from their mainstream school and live within our area.

The Jigsaw Hubs

We currently have 2 Jigsaw Centre hubs. One hub is based in Houghton Regis at the Academy of Central Bedfordshire and our second hub is based in Shelton at Shelton Lower School. Each hub has capacity to accommodate 5 primary-age children, of statutory school age, in school years 1 to 6 (children aged 5 to 11), at any one time.

Admission

The Jigsaw Inreach team provides education from day 6 of the permanent exclusion.

We're notified by the excluding school when a child has been permanently excluded. The information is passed to ourJigsaw Inreach Co-Headteacher.

A member of the Jigsaw Inreach team aims to contact parents and carers within 48 hours of receiving the permanent exclusion notification. 

When contact is made the Jigsaw team will support and guide parents and carers through the next steps of the admission process.

A start date and any questions that you may have can be addressed at this stage.

Aims

We aim to:

• prioritise a child’s safety and social, emotional and mental health
• recognise that behaviour is a form of communication
• provide an inclusive, supportive and nurturing learning environment where children are not judged or criticised
• re-engage children with their learning
• maintain high expectations of all children
• develop positive and supportive partnerships with children, parents and professionals from education, health, and social care to further assess any underlying unmet needs and secure appropriate support
• ensure that all children, parent and carers voices are heard and validated
• help prepare children to prepare for the next stage on their educational journey by providing bespoke reintegration support

At the Jigsaw Centre we believe that education has the potential to transform lives. We believe that education should be stimulating and motivating. We believe that when families, educators and other professionals work together we can nurture children to develop healthy growth mindsets and talents and ultimately experience success in education and life beyond.

We have designed our curriculum with children’s social, emotional and mental health at the heart. We want children to grow as individuals as well as learners. Through a combination of learning techniques, we aim to ensure that children enjoy learning and feel prepared for the next stage in their education. Through value-based activities, we aim to support our children to build resilience, confidence and self-esteem whilst also enabling children to develop their interpersonal skills, creativity and independence. 

We maintain high expectations of all our children and recognise that they should be challenged in their education which includes learning from failures, accepting responsibility for actions and celebrating successes. 

Curriculum aims

Our curriculum aims to:

• provide an exciting, motivational, and stimulating curriculum which is accessible to all
• support children socially, emotionally, and academically
• provide children with the knowledge of how to lead safe, healthy and fulfilling lives
• remove barriers to learning
• make links between classroom learning and everyday life
• ensure all children understand their potential
• prepare children for the next stage in their educational journey

Jigsaw staff aim to achieve this by:

• ensuring that they have the necessary training and knowledge to meet children’s needs
• understanding the impact of adverse childhood experiences and trauma
• providing a safe and secure environment which allows children to feel safe, relax, have fun!
• prioritising a child’s mental health and wellbeing
• ensuring that every child has a positive relationship with supporting adults build on trust and respect
• delivering a personalised and flexible curriculum; making reasonable adjustments to maximise opportunities for success
• understanding that negative behaviour is a manifestation of an unmet need, not a personal and deliberate attack
• nurturing healthy growth mindsets and talents
• incorporating daily activities that support the development of social skills and social communication
• making cross-curricular links so that children can draw upon knowledge from different subjects and experiences and understand how each topic plays a part in everyday life
• capturing children’s imaginations allowing them to place their learning in the context of the world around them
• modelling that practise makes things better, resting is better than quitting, mistakes are part of the learning process and success cannot happen without trying
• ensuring that all children have a voice and know they are heard
• explicitly teaching children strategies that support co and self-regulation
• employing the use of restorative practices
• promoting British Values at every opportunity
• working with a different range of agencies and professionals to enhance the Jigsaw offer

Curriculum offer

Children that attend the Jigsaw Centre, who have been permanently excluded will receive our full curriculum offer. 

This includes:

• daily English
• daily maths
• weekly topic-based activities – science, geography and history
• weekly physical, social and health rducation (PSHE) or relationships and sex education lessons (RSE)
• weekly physical education (PE)
• weekly design technology: cooking or art-based activities
• daily social groups – circle time with a value-based focus with activities and challenges
• daily personalised interventions on a one-to-one basis to support social, emotional, mental health and development

Children benefit from the Jigsaw curriculum by:

• finding a sense of belonging
• learning how to lead safe, healthy, and fulfilling lives
• learning how to recognise the emotions of themselves and others and accepting that all emotions are valid and normal
• discovering an interest in learning
• finding strategies and learning methods to make all subjects accessible
• by recognising that their best is good enough
• developing a healthy growth mindset
• understanding that failure should not be feared; it is part of the road to success
• becoming critical and reflective thinkers
• learning how to cooperate with their peers and respect one another
• participating in value-based circle time activities and challenges
• being supported with the next stages in education

Assessment

We recognise that progress will look different for each individual child, at different stages throughout their educational journey and their time at Jigsaw. 

Social, emotional and mental health, and academic assessments are used, wherever possible. The assessments and screening tools that we use, help Jigsaw staff to identify gaps in learning, plan bespoke interventions, measure children’s progress and understand the impact of our curriculum.

Special educational needs and disabilities support

Each Jigsaw hub has a qualified special, educational, need and disability (SEND) Co-ordinator onsite, alongside experience and skilled support workers, who observe children during structured and unstructured times.

Where a child is not making the progress (socially, emotionally, and academically) Jigsaw staff work alongside the child, parents and professionals to try and unpick the barriers to identify strategies and personalised interventions, if needed, to support and to do this we may use additional screening assessment tools.

In some cases, with parental/carer consent, if further exploration or more specialist advice is needed, we may make referrals to an external agency for more specific assessments to identify further support.

External agencies could include, but not limited to:

• speech and language therapy
• education psychology
• child development centres
• physiotherapy
• occupational therapy