Inside the West Midlands school that celebrates every child's journey

Telford Park School on Grange Avenue in Stirchley caters for children with a wide-range of needs and its catchment area includes children from Wolverhampton and South Staffordshire.

Its headteacher, Amy Huntington, who has been in the post for two years has said that the school is 'inclusive by design'.

She said: “I'm so proud of the journey we've been on in the last two years.

“We've been on a rapid improvement journey. We've made huge progress at the culture of our school in terms of teacher learning, curriculum, safeguarding, and SEND.

“We started just over two years ago. I came in as headteacher and we had lots of challenges and we've done an amazing job to become fully staffed and ensure that our children are really happy.

“They feel safe and supported and they're making the academic progress that they absolutely deserve.

“We are an inclusive school, we're inclusive by design. So we've completely overhauled our teaching and learning strategy, our curriculum, to ensure that our children leave here with the knowledge they need for their next steps.

“We know that all of our children have a different journey, but we want to prepare them as best we can, so they can go on to do exactly what they want in the future. “We ensure that we've got a fantastic enrichment offer for our young people, every year we have a whole school trip.

“And alongside that we've got a fantastic enrichment offer, both after school, at breakfast club during the school day, and we fully fund all of our food technology ingredients, so it helps our families, but ensures that our children get lots and lots of experiences alongside the academic progress.

“All of our children have an equipment pack at the beginning of each lesson, which has what they absolutely need to access.

“That completely removes any barriers, means that the lesson can start really quickly and effectively, and our children can have everything they need in front of them.”

She said the school had also worked with pupils to change the school uniform.

She said: “We knew from feedback from parents and children that the uniform was not practical, wasn't comfortable, and it was really expensive.

“So we've worked with some local suppliers to make the uniform more comfortable, more practical, but also a reduction of 50 per cent in cost to help our families in our community.

“We've had significant improvements across all areas, but for us, our transition package that we've managed to offer this year. We've got a brand new building which we've dedicated to our year sevens.

“When they come in, they've got that slow transition into school. We’ve worked really closely with our feeder primaries, got to know our students before they come to the school.”

She said the school also had an “amazing attendance” record.

“We want the absolute best for our students and our community,” she added.

“They deserve it. We all work together because we want the children to have the best possible experience of school.”