There are an additional 8 Supported Places based in the mainstream nursery. These consist of  4  places in the morning and 4 in the afternoon.  Placements are decided by a panel from Achieving for Children. Surbiton Hill Nursery is not involved in this process.  

A supported place at Surbiton Hill Nursery offers a total communication environment through the enhanced ratio of two children to one adult.  The adult support is from Specialist Early Years Practitioners who offer intensive interaction, small group targeted activities, the use of visuals and one to one interventions among many other strategies. The children in supported places have access to a Speech and Language Therapist and Assistant, and an Occupational Therapist  who work closely with the children and the whole supported place teaching team. Occupational Therapy. and Speech and Language Therapy is integrated throughout the children’s whole session. Each child follows a personalised curriculum based on their developmental needs across all areas of the early years curriculum in the mainstream nursery environment.  Supported Place children follow our bespoke Specialist Resource Provision curriculum and targets are devised using the SCERTs model (see below). A child’s learning journey focuses on  regulation, attention, communication and social interaction. Regular  meetings are held over the course of the year to discuss these targets with parents.  

The SENCo  and WELLCOM lead have the responsibility to oversee and support the SEND practitioners to deliver a nurturing but challenging curriculum. 

 

SCERTS

We follow the SCERTS Model.  The SCERTS programme is broken down into 3 areas which focus on “SC” – social communication, “ER” – emotional regulation and “TS”- transactional support.

Social Communication enables us to focus on how children are communicating and set targets for small steps of progress, concentrating on encouraging children to interact with others and use different methods of communication.

Emotional Regulation focuses on using adult support to enable children to maintain sensory regulation throughout the day and reduce anxiety.

Transactional Support  focuses on what practitioners do to support the individual child’s needs and interests through changing communication styles, adapting the environment and providing the tools to enhance learning. TS covers anything used to help others understand and respond to the child’s needs better

This distinctive model provides a framework that focuses on relationships with adults and adaptations to the learning environment to support those children within the Autistic Spectrum. The SCERTS model is a toolkit to help aid children with communicational, social and emotional difficulties and further develop these skills.