4th April 2024
Dear all Parents and Carers
We hope you had a lovely break and celebrated Easter and Eid with friends, family, and our community.
The Inclusion team at Erdington have been working hard to put in place a welcoming plan for our future year 7 students. We are working with 55 primary schools to ensure we know as much as possible about these remarkable young people. We are also working hard to welcome their parents and carers by putting on coffee mornings, activities and sending out communications.
If there is any old uniform that you have, perhaps your child is in year 11 and you won’t need their uniform for much longer then please do bring into school any reusable items for future generations.
This year all staff will attend a training session on the 8th of April on ADHD. We have been working with the ADHD Award organisation since November 2023 to ensure that Erdington is recognised as an ADHD friendly school. We have been learning how to improve our teaching, interventions, and support for these young people. We have increased our Zones of Regulation intervention which supports students with their emotional regulation. We have purchased for every single teacher a zipped bag of ADHD friendly devices that help students focus in lessons. We will be using these through the summer term.
As a school we have embraced that teaching a child with SEND doesn’t mean different teaching. We adapt a lesson by teaching expertly. The teaching and learning team are leading on how to expertly teach so that all students in all lessons can and do make progress. For the summer term, we are running more interventions now for those students that need additional support. If your child is part of that then you will have received a letter detailing the intervention they are taking part in. Thank you for your support with this. As always, we follow the graduated response which is nicely summarised pictorially below.
The team have also been working with a local ADHD expert who has been running a parental and child workshop with 6 families through the Spring Term. Thank you so much for your participation in this and the commitment you showed coming every week.
Finally, our continued mantra is ‘Attend today, Achieve tomorrow’ and we look forward to seeing Erdington Academy students in every day and thriving.
We wish you and your child a fantastic summer term.
Kind regards,
J.Hunt
Assistant Principal, and the SEND team
