Gretton School warmly welcomes autistic children and young people aged from 5-19 years old, as weekly boarders or as day students.

Wonderfully unique

At Gretton, every student has a diagnosis of autism or Asperger’s syndrome and every student is wonderfully unique.

Alongside the school’s commitment to delivering a high-quality, broad and balanced curriculum, they are equally committed to ensuring the school is as inclusive, vibrant and supportive as possible. With this in mind, in January 2022, the Headteacher, together with a multidisciplinary team of staff, launched an updated version of their Behaviour Policy… but instead of calling it a Behaviour Policy, it is called the Positive Relationships Policy.

At Gretton, the whole team works hard to ensure the development of strong, positive relationships with their students. These relationships are the very foundations of all they do to support the learning, personal development and emotional growth of their learners as they make their way through their school journey. The policy promotes a clear departure from a traditional sanction-based policy, focusing instead on the incredible power of reflective conversations, supportive strategies and – over time – the very clear reduction in behaviours of concern.

We know, when working with autistic young people, that it can be really difficult making sense of the world around them and that they may, as a result, experience dysregulation of emotions. The approach at Gretton seeks to recognise behaviour as a language and work to understand what a learner is telling us so that we can work together with them to find solutions and strategies to manage overwhelm.

Many of the young people at Gretton School may have struggled in previous settings. The staff at Gretton School work therapeutically with their learners, to understand their uniqueness and to build healthy and positive relationships in order for them to develop greater self-esteem and show them they can make different choices.

The policy outlines Primary, Secondary and Tertiary strategies staff work with to make their environment as positive as possible for their students. A selection of examples from each tier can be found below.

Primary Strategies

These are all the things they do as a school all day, every day to develop a safe learning environment. These things include everything from the safety of the school campus and environments to the very individual support each learner needs around them

• The structure of the school day, so that learners know what to expect on their timetables.
• The structure of the class groups and residential houses (for boarding learners) and the staff that work with the students.
• The communication and collaboration with parents to co-develop strategies and support for learners.
• The development of Individual Education Plans and Individual Behaviour Plans, to take account of the unique nature of a learner’s needs, interests, triggers and responses to behaviours, as detailed in their EHCP.

Secondary Strategies

These are the things that all staff are trained to think carefully about, in order to manage and support the day-to-day interaction between people on site.

• We ask staff to notice and be curious about the learner’s behaviours, understanding when a learner is feeling emotion and recognising when they might need support to identify, name, describe or manage the feelings they are experiencing.
• We ask staff to use de-escalation strategies to try to reduce the potentially volatile nature of interactions and feelings through distraction, diversion, affirmation, compromise and, ultimately, reflection and restorative practices.
• We ask staff to consciously aim to separate a learner’s feelings from their behaviours.
• The most important part of managing any incident at school is the learning conversations that take place afterwards and when a child is calm and ready to reflect. Staff are trained to find a range of ways to support a learner to have these conversations in order to support them to explore other – more constructive – ways to express feelings and frustrations.
• We ask staff to make use of positive language, to give learners options for acceptable behaviours rather than asking them to refrain from unacceptable behaviours, for example, “let’s do this” rather than “don’t do that”.

Tertiary Strategies

These are the strategies that are employed when a child has reached a high arousal level and is starting to display behaviours of concern. No single approach will work for all children all of the time, so we ask staff to be familiar with an individual learner, in order that they understand the best ways to support in a heightened situation.

Our aim at Gretton is to work so hard on the primary and secondary strategies that we rarely have to support a child to manage incidents because we have offered them a dignified and positive way out of the situation. Our staff will hold learners in positive regard no matter what and they will start each day afresh, regardless of whether the child has had a difficult day or has been struggling beforehand. This attitude of hearts and minds within the staff team has built over time, but we are enormously proud of the environment we have created for the children and young people at Gretton.

“We believe you changed the course of our son’s life and we will never be able to express the extent of our gratitude to you”
– Parent

Gretton School – where autism makes sense

For further information or to view the new Positive Relationships Policy in full, visit their website: https://www.grettonschool.com/policies or contact Gretton School today on 01223 277438.