Moving to a new school can disrupt some support systems for children, and some can find the whole experience daunting. Add to this a specific learning need and the move to secondary school can be an even more daunting experience. The intent of the Bridging Pathway is to support students making this move and ensures that these students will have an experience that is smooth, supported, and successful throughout Key Stage 3. We want to ensure our students feel confident both in themselves as they start their secondary school journey, but also encourage them to grow in confidence as learners.

The curriculum content of the Bridging Pathway is English and literacy-based, which is often the main barrier for many children. We want to expose our strudents to literature that can challenge them, but that they can also engage with. We work with the knowledge students already have, and in fact we really value and celebrate this. The aim, through engagement with chosen texts, and themed-approached learning, is to increase reading and writing fluency in order that students will develop skills and independence to access the whole school curriculum and wider life beyond.

Students in the Bridging Pathway attend classes with a smaller number of students in order to support the relevant needs of each individual. In Year 7 this will be for all their timetabled English lessons, alongside time for themed learning for developing literacy skills. By Year 8 and Year 9 students have usually made great progress and are in less need of the provision and therefore their timetables reflect this, but we continue to support them for some element of their curriculum – all the time thinking about the need of the individual.

We also use other literacy-based interventions within the Bridging Pathway lessons for specific group of students. The purpose of this is for students to make even better progress in all aspects of reading, comprehension, understanding and inference in order to support them across all areas of the school curriculum.

Our intention is that students meet their best individual potential, develop confidence in themselves and also in their ability to learn. We are passionate about ensuring their start to life at ECC is a positive experience.