Keywords: School, Bespoke, Database
Avalon School
Market Sector: Special Needs School
Year Started: Unknown
People: 24
Working with us since: 2006
Avalon School, based in Street, is at the forefront of education for children with special needs and is leading the way for how special needs pupils throughout the country are educated and assessed.
Chief amongst these is their development of a system for monitoring the progress and development of the students. It is just as important to measure the progress of students with special needs as other students, but no system currently exists for doing so.
Head Teacher, Neil Galloway, said "For some of our students, simply playing with other children for as little as ten minutes can be a major achievement, and one which parents are justifiably extremely proud of. However, the national curriculum for mainstream schools does not offer any scope for measuring and recording these achievements and as they can be very small steps by mainstream standards."
He added, "We have taken a number of different classification systems and combined them in a unique way to allow us to measure the progress of students within the limits of their abilities. We are the only school doing anything like this in the country"
It is equally important for children with special needs to have their progress recorded and encouraged as it is for mainstream children. It is also extremely important for the parents to know how their children are progressing, as well as for the school to have some measure of their success.
Benchmark’s Managing Director, Simon Harvey, who is also a Governor of the school, said, "It is great to be able to offer our services to the school in this way when there is no existing system to help them assess the pupils. Avalon School is at the cutting edge of methods being used to help children with special needs. Technically, the software is not very complex, but the challenge is to create a system that is very usable while allowing the school to record, quantify and report on hard-to-pin-down issues." He added, "it is extremely rewarding to see how great a difference it makes to the school. It is this kind of situation where well-designed software really comes into its own."