Our Mission

At Eton Dorney School, we place pupils at the heart of everything we plan for and do, to ensure they leave our school with the confidence to thrive on their next educational journey or back into mainstream education.

We understand our pupils’ special needs as we know our children well and it is our mission to ensure that they know themselves well to further make good life choices and live healthy independent lives.

We encourage our pupils to become kind, compassionate, confident, independent, well-rounded individuals.

At Eton Dorney we instill the skills to show our children that they have a purpose and the right to a voice on their educational journey and beyond.

We build their confidence in believing in themselves, equipping them to lead a successful and rewarding life. One that they so rightly deserve to have.

We endeavour to achieve this through our four values which is reflected in our school culture and shared with our pupils daily. 

• Nurturing,
• Kindness,
• Compassion,
• Self-belief

Our Vision

We aim for every child to experience an amazing educational experience, whilst at Eton Dorney

As a whole approach we will:  

• Provide a safe, secure, and therapeutic environment, which allows children to work at their own pace, have fun and enjoy themselves.
• A love for learning; making sure that our children are happy at school is a key priority.
• Provide a flexible, practical, thematic and mastery approach to our curriculum with emphasis on: Wellbeing; communications and interactions; cognition and learning.
• Ensure the curriculum intent, implementation & impact are embedded consistently across all subjects and all pupils, irrelevant of their SEN. All pupils are challenged to reach their full potential and no child is left behind.
• Ensure that our pupils' individual Education Plans are current, appropriate, ‘live’ and progressive. Through increased staff ownership and participation, staff input will evidence progression and accountability.
• Develop lessons, experiences, and opportunities with schemas, which explore and develop, creating additional linguistic opportunities and development. 
• Grow our environment making sure it is reflective of our policies and practices. Are we doing what it 'says on the tin’?
• Continuously ensure that all staff enjoy a work life balance, where they can report high levels of support for well-being and there is a sense of team effort and support.
• Strengthen relationships established by nurture, trust, challenge, and mutual respect.
• Grow pupils voice ensuring that it is active, valued and embedded as our democratic culture, especially regarding own educational journeys and aspirations.
• Provide innovative opportunities for pupils to explore environmental, sustainable, and political issues and topics, on a local, national, and global scale.
• Ensure we develop our therapeutic provision, where our offer is an integral part of the learner’s journey.
• Strengthen collaboration and shared activities, training, and practices with other schools locally, nationally, and internationally
• Ensure that a strong relationship between the Director and Headteacher will provide confident, honest, transparent but challenging strategic leadership to create a robust accountability for educational and financial performance
• Work with parents, carers and professionals to ensure that we get the very best out of our children.
• Model the fact that we never stop learning and that learning can be enjoyable, despite their possible past challenging educational experiences.

Our pupils will:

• Be encouraged to engage in a variety of activities and experiences to promote their progress, improve their participation and attendance, and make the necessary changes to engage in their own education. They can achieve and will!
• Experience consistent boundaries and positive behaviour management with trained staff through therapeutic thinking.
• Believe in themselves, value others, and respect their school community.
• Be able to set themselves realistic goals, and targets - especially in their annual reviews and professional meetings.
• Understand that we believe that they can improve, and we aim to help them believe this as well!
• Develop a sense of pride in themselves, their work and being part of our school community. They know that we enjoy working with them and hope that they enjoy working with us!
• Go onto become life-long learners and thrive in their next journeys.

Our staff will:

• Keep our children safe, secure, and prioritised.
• Promote equity as well as equality (Therapeutic Thinking).
• Encourage, empathise and love working with our pupils.
• Will go the ‘extra mile’ to help pupils make the changes they need to make.
• Appreciate that they are preparing pupils for jobs that don’t even exist right now!
• Promote the values of respect, responsibility, honesty, hard work, equality and appreciation of differences.
• Provide pupils with the opportunity to express themselves verbally/non-verbally in a productive and reassuring manner.
• Promote educational development in the widest sense including cognitively, creatively, and physical developmentally.
• Promote the role of the family - whatever shape or form that may take.
• Provide a well-resourced, safe, and welcoming environment for everybody.
• Use Therapeutic Thinking as a positive behaviour management process to enable our pupils to become able to self-regulate more often and with independence.
• Enable and encourage a love of learning for fun!
• Model the behaviour that we expect from pupils so that they can undertake the future roles that they would like, and make a meaningful contribution to their communities and society.