Learning Support
At Skillset Senior College, our approach to Learning Support is guided by our vision for the “best future imaginable” for our students. The provision of dedicated, specialist and individualised learning support is not viewed as an intervention for the few ‘neediest’ students, but instead as a comprehensive and essential part of the learning journey for all our young people.
Students come to us with a wide range of innate and learned abilities. Some 40% of students have an identified disability or presentation that may impact on their access to school and learning. However, our students’ academic abilities reflect more than just their cognitive capabilities, and we take care not to limit our expectations of their capacity for learning.
Key issues to be aware of include:
- The effect of missed school / issues that inhibit attendance on learning
- Social, cultural and economic climate on access to continuous, quality education
- Level of literacy and numeracy impact on access to all KLAs
- Emotion regulation and the role of the autonomic nervous system impacting on access to learning environments for individuals
The provision of learning support at SSC includes support and development of skills in:
- Literacy and language
- Numeracy
- Emotional literacy
- Personal/physical care
- Social integration
Individual Education Plan (IEP)
For each and every student at SSC, we develop an Individual Education Plan (IEP) that identifies areas of strength, preferences in learning style, and areas for specific development. Each teacher and learning support staff member accesses the IEP to plan curriculum delivery and adjustments. The IEP also guides assessment, and assists in the collaborative process for determining provision of specific interventions.
The development of the IEP also supports the process of collating information needed to maintain our level of specialist funding, collected via the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data (NCCD) scheme each year. This data helps us identify and account for the level of adjustment provided to individual students, based on their needs. As SSC is a designated ‘special assistance school’, we receive additional funding from the federal government which allows us to provide a high degree of support to our students, increasing the staff-to-student ratio and supporting intensive interventions.