'She is loving learning here, she's just a different child'

Parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) have praised the work of a Leeds school as it celebrates its 10th anniversary.

Pivot Academy was set up in 2016 to offer an alternative setting to mainstream education and has seen pupil numbers go from just a handful to more than 100.

Dawn said her 15-year-old daughter Isabel had been out of mainstream education for a "very long time" before she started at Pivot, but was now "thriving" and "like a different child".

Head teacher Cheryl Lotherington said: "In an ideal world learners would go to their local mainstream school however there's lots of learners that do need something different."

Dawn said: "As soon as we walked through the building on the open evening we were absolutely blown away.

"First of all it did not feel like a school, it felt so calm and relaxing.

"Both me and my husband said to each other this is definitely the place for her.

"[Now]she's up early every single morning. She's really excited. She's happy and she's made friends. She is loving learning here, she's just absolutely a different child.

"Even this time last year I thought Isabel wouldn't be able to be doing her GCSEs and she is absolutely thriving and she's now going to be able to take her GCSEs next year, which is massive."

Pivot operates sites in Leeds and Huddersfield, and employs more than 170 teachers, mentors and support staff.

CEO and founder Michael Smith said, having been excluded from two schools as a child himself, it was after taking a job as a teaching assistant aged 18 that he developed a passion for education.

He said he believed there was "a lack of variety" at mainstream schools for meeting children's needs as a result of the pressure on them to try and mix provision.

"But," he said, "how can you educate and house a child with complex needs in mainstream schools and expect them all to get the same outcomes?"

Dawn said: "There are so many children out there, that are getting failed by education settings and all it needs it just an environment change, just little things to change it for children so they can feel comfortable and safe in schools."

Figures suggest more than 120,000 children are absent from education in Yorkshire and the Humber, many of whom are from a SEND background.

Among the adjustments at Pivot are classrooms with low lights and soft furnishings split across a cluster of buildings.

The group says 82% of pupils' education, health and care plan (EHCP) targets were being met or exceeded, with attendance recovery going from zero to about 90% for learners experiencing severe school-based anxiety.

Amber, 14, who has autism, was out of mainstream school for 18 months.

Her mum, Liz, said the environment at Pivot had been life changing for her daughter.

"One day, in mainstream primary, she lay down on our driveway; she couldn't come back in the house, because she didn't want to give up on going to school, but she couldn't go to school either.

"For two hours we sat out there with her. She wasn't refusing to go to school, she could not go to school.

"It was heart-breaking, when you see all this stuff, and it's like 'in my day we'd have made them' - I think there's a real dismissal of it as, 'oh well it wasn't a problem', I think it was a problem I just don't think we had the statistics."

Last May, a government consultation over the future of how specialist education is commissioned, delivered and funded closed.

Those with front-line experience are calling for more provision to meet demand.

Pivot head Lotherington said: "These learners are the ones that have fallen through the middle, the inbetweeners, there was nowhere for them to go.

"We decided to set up an offer to meet these needs."

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