We teach all lessons in English and it's essential that your child has a sufficient ability in English to fully access our curriculum and wider school life. To help students, we provide support through our EAL programme. This is a partnership between school and home, designed to create an environment where students maximise their development. Upon application your child will have an EAL assessment if English is not your spoken language at home. If we are able to offer your child a place, and a EAL need has been identified, they'll take part in compulsory EAL lessons.
Primary EAL
Our EAL teachers typically work alongside the student’s teacher(s), and EAL support will consist of small group lessons and in class support. The frequency of these depends on the level of your child when assessed and may be reduced as your child progresses.
Secondary EAL
Our secondary learners receive EAL support in order to equip them with the skills needed to meet the linguistic demands of the curriculum and build their confidence in academic English. Support includes independent language and literature lessons as well as in-class support.
We believe every child at our school should be given the support they need to feel empowered and access our curriculum independently. We have a dedicated team of learning support professionals that provide holistic learning strategies to help our students with identified learning support needs. In these cases, we will create personalised targets to break down their learning into small achievable goals.
We are able to support your child's skill development with reading fluency, reading comprehension, written expression, numeracy, verbal communication, motor control, and other independent learning skills. We are also provide support to students that face challenges with their emotional resilience, concentration, self-esteem and social skills.
We are unable to support children with significant and severe learning difficulties, particularly those requiring a considerable amount of 1:1 support and we do not provide Educational Psychology, Occupational Therapy or other specialist services. We do however, have a limited Speech and Language provision, to which referrals are made internally by our Learning Support specialists.
Please do initially discuss your child’s needs further with our admissions team, so that we can assess if our school would currently be able to offer the level of support needed, for your child to thrive and reach their full potential.
Your child will flourish at BIS HCMC, where our all-encompassing approach to education balances academic excellence with personal growth and wellbeing, inspiring a lifelong love of learning.
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