The Farringdon Centre, Salisbury
Our school and education centre in Salisbury, Wiltshire, is registered with the DCSF as an ‘independent special school for pupils of secondary age with complex needs and social, emotional and behavioural difficulties’.
We are registered for up to 12 pupils.
Some of our pupils are on outreach programmes from other schools, some attend full time and live in our residential children’s homes nearby, and some are here on temporary assessment programmes or for respite and educational support. All our pupils have 1:1 support at all times, a fully personalised education programme delivered by qualified and experienced staff, and all have access to a full range of national curriculum subjects and national accreditation.
We operate from a delightful location in the centre of this historic city. The Centre occupies a Grade 1 listed building in a church close which faces a large green area. On the other side of the green is a former church, now the home of the Salisbury Arts Centre, a vibrant facility and a readily available additional resource for our Centre.
The Farringdon Centre has been established for young people with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, and complex needs. It is an entirely new school designed specifically to meet the challenges and opportunities of this new era in children’s services.
The school itself offers a warm, welcoming and predictable environment where pupils can begin to trust in the competence, reliability and caring concern of the adult world and to make significant progress in their learning. The core of the work is with the full time pupils who, because of their complex and difficult lives to date, have proven to be too hard to place elsewhere for education. We are also able to offer a variety of flexible provisions to meet the special educational needs of those young people in foster care and those still living in the community.
The educational provision for this vulnerable and at times challenging group is a carefully thought out combination of:
- High staff : pupil ratios
- Small group inclusion and social skills workshops
- The National Curriculum delivered to provide breadth, balance and choice in the programme for hitherto disinterested and disaffected pupils
- Creative and expressive activities to support the acquisition of literacy and emotional health and intelligence
A therapeutic dimension in each day that ensures time and opportunities to address pupils often complex needs, not least to build the trusting relationships that are important in themselves and the vital foundations for more age appropriate learning and growing.
Partnership and collaborative working with the home base, whether natural parents, foster carers or residential staff, together with the representatives of the placing authorities.
