Visions & Values

Thomas Ashton School is a place where every pupil can achieve their full potential through the building and strength of positive relationships: TRY, ACHIEVE, SUCCEED and THRIVE.

Our school wide vision is to achieve borough wide recognition as the best provider of education for children with Social, Emotional and Mental Health Difficulties, including those with Social Communication Difficulties with Emotional dysregulation.

We have our FANTASTIC rules: Show respect with actions and words - KS 3

Kind Hands, Kind Feet, Kind Words - KS1 &2

Thomas Ashton School is heading towards being a THRIVE school. This means that we aim to have the THRIVE ethos embedded within our curriculum and THRIVE approaches across our whole setting. We also follow the Team Teach Approach to positive behaviour management and physical intervention. Both approaches focus primarily on the needs of the child, providing strategies to both manage challenging behaviours and also to promote positive changes in behaviour. Our approach is to try to understand why behaviours occur and find solutions to support the child through the experience.

We believe in an Attachment Aware and Trauma Informed approach based upon the ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and the Thrive Approach, appendix 1).
We believe that over-compensatory, rich, relational interventions can bring about recovery so that children and young people can function well at home, school and out in their communities.
We believe in earning privileges rather than a reward and punishment approach.
We believe in supporting our pupils unconditionally and without judgement to support them to learn to make the most appropriate decisions around their behaviour. This involves a ‘real world’ approach where privileges are earned and our behaviour has an effect on how others treat us.
We believe in a regulatory approach to supporting behaviour where we, the adults, are the shame and stress regulators for the students ( THRIVE Approach)
We use the Vital Relational Functions approach to supporting our students to emotionally regulate. ( THRIVE Approach)
We use PACE, we are Playful, Accepting, Curious and Empathetic when working with our students.
We aim to continually strengthen our understanding of how social and emotional learning develops, how it can be supported and how this underpins the capacity and availability for wider academic learning.
We believe that the building of positive relationships is the key to understanding and changing the way our students perceive the world around them.

Our school environment, resources, learning approaches, timetable and planning are all informed by our understanding of social emotional development and its impact on learning. Drawing all these elements together is a long term vision for the school and is a central part of our School Improvement Plan.

We recognise that some behaviours can be learned and are within our cognitive awareness but also that others can be unconscious, defence or discharge responses that might feel overwhelming to children. Attentive, observant adults and the development of positive working relationships with children are necessary in order to be able to recognise behaviours, identify the underlying needs and respond in appropriate ways.

We are very clear that everyone has the right to feel safe, feel special and to have their needs met. Therefore, our Relational and Behaviour Policy reflects the deeper, important social and emotional learning that each child needs to develop, both personally and within our community, where effective and consistent ‘containment’ aims to ensure that one individual’s needs does not adversely impact on another’s.

We are a school with a commitment to tolerance and inclusion.

The development of positive social, emotional and learning behaviours is at the heart of this Behaviour Policy.

We aim to encourage our students to build tolerance, make good choices and take responsibility, in readiness for them taking their place in society.

Gaining a sense of pride and building self-awareness through planned and incidental social and emotional learning and positive experiences is part of the ethos of our school.

Through our core BE values we aim to enable our students:

To experience challenges, succeed in their learning and have a sense that learning can be fun and relevant to their lives.
To become independent, self-aware learners – socially, emotionally and academically.
To have a sense of self-worth and belonging.
To learn safe and appropriate ways to communicate and regulate their emotions.
To be enthusiastic and foster a willingness to take risks.
To understand, regulate and manage emotions, to apply thinking between feeling (sensation and emotion) and action.
To increasingly show empathy and understanding to others is core to our learning.
To be able to access and make progress with their academic, social and emotional learning.

Our Core ‘Be’ Values/ Habits

Be Considerate
Be Honest
Be Joyful
Be Enquiring
Be Tolerant
Be Resilient

It is the policy of Thomas Ashton School to have a shared code of values for all staff and pupils based on:

Tolerance and Consideration for all.
Promoting a Joyful and Enquiring approach.
Being honest.
Building resilience.
Building positive relationships between staff, pupils, carers and other agencies.

In order to achieve these aims we believe that staff, pupils, parents/carers and school governors need to work together to ensure a consistency in the development of appropriate behaviour through the school Relational and Behaviour policy. This policy sets out:

Approaches to developing Positive Behaviours.
What we think are the benefits of appropriate behaviour.
Our behavioural expectations.
How we encourage positive behaviour.
How we discourage inappropriate behaviour.