What is Learning Support?

Mrs Krystle Flack, Head of Learning Support, Cranleigh School

to support them in the classroom. It could be a really minor detail but solving it sets them off on their own journey. We’re always helping to build that confidence that makes them independent and shows them not to compare themselves to others. The individual experience is at the heart of everything we do, whether it’s just strategies, differentiation in the classroom or one-to-one support – the idea is that we are building students up to flourish and thrive, regardless of any challenges or difficulties they face.

Many students will have coping strategies and will have learned to travel the academic journey on their own by using these, but then get to a level where their strategies stop working, perhaps around GCSEs or A-Levels. So it’s not uncommon to find that students who seemed to manage in the first few years at senior school then need help further down the line.

If pupils don’t need full support they can have regular reviews or check-ins at odd times, such as when facing exams and stress is looming. We can support with homework too, so if a student is really struggling with a concept we can break it down for them and that gives them the skillset to go and use resources correctly and find answers for themselves. They can then go into exams with a little more confidence.

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Learning support is all about developing skillsets to enable pupils to become independent learners. The aim is to ensure that students who need support can thrive, not just at school but in the outside world. The strategies we put in place now will help them to succeed into higher education and their eventual careers.

We avoid using labels and look at each child as an individual. Labels, such as dyslexia, become something that we work around and with to help the student, ideally with parents on board too. If we have a good relationship with parents it supports the student and we can allow parents to take a step back and provide the care and nurturing that teenagers need, whilst we take on the role of pushing the student to progress.

We aim to help each student identify their skills and discover how we might need to adapt teaching