Nurture Provision
Nurture Group
Nurture Group at Chesterton Primary School
Nurture Group takes place in the Butterfly Room. The Nurture room is designed to be a bridge between home and school; a place where children can feel safe and secure and therefore develop their individual needs further. The Butterfly room has a table to share snacks and activities, access to outside through the adjacent corridor to enjoy group games and time outdoors. Children are in nurture for a limited time (typically no more than 2 sessions a day depending on their level of need) and are transitioned back to class when assessments show appropriate progress has been made for them to be successful, independent learners.
What is the purpose of Nurture Group & its Philosophy?
Nurture Group is a small class of pupils (6-8). Its composition is carefully well thought-out to create a balanced and functional group. Its purpose is to offer children opportunities to re-visit early learning skills and promote and support their social and emotional development. There is much research evidence that children’s learning is most effective when they have a sense of emotional well-being, good self-esteem and a feeling of belonging to their school community. The Nurture Room provides children with this opportunity and so helps to develop their maturity and resilience.
Nurture is not about excluding children from a quality education, it is about providing a bespoke curriculum that will ensure children have the opportunity to develop their social skills and emotional awareness. This will give them the highest chance for success in the classroom and governors will monitor the impact on learning. The Nurture Room is a place of learning.
The Nurture Group Principles:
- Children’s learning is understood developmentally
- The classroom offers a safe base
- All behaviour is communication
- The importance of transition in children’s lives
- Has an reduced adult/child ratio compared to classroom teaching, and provides lots of opportunities for speaking and listening activities
- Builds a child’s self-esteem and confidence
- Builds skills for classroom learning
- Language is a vital means of communication
Who is Nurture Group for?
Children may attend sessions in the Nurture Group for specific reasons, such as:
- Friendship difficulties – keeping/making friends
- Quiet, shy, withdrawn
- Find it hard to listen to others or join in
- Disruptive towards others
- Find it hard to accept losing a game
- Find it hard to share and take turns
- Find it difficult to cope in the classroom
- Low self esteem
- Find it hard to manage their emotions appropriately
- Are learning to build or develop relationships with others
- Are developing their teamwork skills and learning to work in different groups and pairings
- Are working on overcoming challenges, persistence and resilience. Believing a different approach can help
- Developing their listening and attention
What difference does Chesterton Primary School Nurture Group make?
Children that have attended our Nurture Group have developed their:
- confidence and self esteem
- belief in themselves as learners, which can impact hugely on their academic success
- language, literacy and maths skills
- friendships
- enjoyment of school
- concentration
- management of emotions including sharing/turn taking
What is a nurture group
Chesterton Primary School’s Nurture Group is a class:
- Of around 6 – 8 children.
- Taught by 1 members of staff.
- Providing play based opportunities to help children learn to negotiate, turn take, share, listen to others, concentrate and plan.
- Providing bespoke teaching activities suited to individual needs based on their Boxall Assessment (see below).
- Rich texts (fiction and non-fiction) are used to inspire and promote learning.
- Providing children with a chance to develop positive relationships with the teaching staff and each other.
- Promoting children’s self-esteem and build their confidence.
- Where snack time is used to help with social learning and encouraging children to attend to the needs of others.
What assessment do you use to inform planning and next steps?
Our Nurture Group is bespoke to each individual child, therefore planning will be specific to develop individual needs based on their assessment of the Boxall Profile. The children will be assessed from the Boxall Profile which assesses their social, emotional and behavioural development.
The Boxall Profile identifies the levels of skills the children and young people possess to access learning. Sometimes children are insecure about their worth, often not able to articulate their feelings. Instead they show their discomfort by withdrawal, achieving much less than they could, and unable to form good relationships. Others may act out their feelings of anger. Whatever the behaviour, the result is that they do not get positively engaged in education. Understanding what lies behind this can make all teachers much more confident in their class management, which is where the Boxall Profile comes in.