In education too often we encounter services stripped of funding that can’t meet the complex needs of some learners. As a teacher and parent, I have seen it from both sides. Too often learners fall through the cracks.
One beacon of hope that I’ve come across is The Cottage - the interrupted learners’ service (among other things) for Falkirk Council.
My own experience of this service came when a teacher at my daughter’s school, overcome with emotion, told me “we are failing her - we’re just failing her”, and when child and adolescent mental health services told me not to send her back until school could meet her needs. Spoiler alert: school could never meet her needs. The resources and the expertise simply weren’t there.
She has left the school system now, moving on to adulthood as a more balanced, positive and successful young woman because of her time at The Cottage.
Support for pupils with ASN
She started there, after Covid lockdown, with no confidence that any part of the education system could help her. She lamented that “the system isn’t built for people like me”.
And she’s not wrong. Her autistic profile meant she knew what she was missing; she knew her own limitations but also what her (exceedingly high) aspirations were - and that school could not help.
In came Jenny McNeill and her inspirational staff at The Cottage. My surly girl, suspicious and damaged by “the system”, found a completely different experience. Staff work with young people on a first-name basis, in casual clothes, with one-to-one or small-group support and a focus on the whole young person.
So often my daughter could do nothing there but vent, and she had the space to do this amid support, compassion and cake. So many little things - her favourite drink available, hugs (she’d never wanted to give any before) - and the flexibility to adapt to her needs meant that our “graduation” from there in June was a poignant event.
A lifeline for families
This is a service that I’m sure has to fight for survival in a time of swingeing cuts, but it is a lifeline for the families that use it. It is, in its own way, a family.
Although learners stay on the roll at their original school, Jenny and her team (the amazing Tracey Pollock, in my child’s case) take on the support for each young person. They support learners to get to a place of mental wellbeing, which then makes learning possible. This seems like such a simple concept, yet it is revolutionary in our system: we all know learners have to be in the right mindset to learn, but where are the mainstream resources to make this possible?
In Falkirk they’re at The Cottage. Some learners need extensive support for mental and physical health before they’re even able to consider learning - and so it was for my daughter. She sat two Advanced Highers in S6 because that work was done and she could once again feel like she wasn’t “a burden”, a “problem to be solved”. For the first time she felt valued by a place of education; before her experience with The Cottage, she had never felt liked, wanted or valued by school, which is heartbreaking.
The Cottage, then, supports young people to transition, whether back to school or on to work or further education. It provides college-partnership programmes that cover real-life, much-needed skills: cooking, painting and decorating, and personal development to name a few. They also help young people get the support they need beyond their school years.
Model of genuine inclusion
The greatest thing, though, is that in this special place young people feel loved throughout; they feel successful, wanted and part of something. This is a model of genuine inclusion.
In one of the rooms there is a beautiful mural of The Wizard of Oz, which epitomises the experience that our learners get there: they find courage to engage with life, learning that enriches the brain - and a place that absolutely feels like home.
Nicola Daniel is curriculum leader for the English faculty at Broughton High School in Edinburgh
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