School Service
Schools and children’s services face many challenges in developing, delivering, and sustaining meaningful services for children with physical, emotional, or mental health needs. This is why WCT’s multidisciplinary team approach was created to understand the whole child.
WCT works internationally with various children’s services, including local authorities, nurseries, schools, hospices, children’s homes, charities, community services, mental health services, and PRU and virtual schools. To support organisations developing sustainable, ethical, and evidence-based service development tools and frameworks.
WCT designs and delivers schools and organisational tool kits to deliver and track effective treatment and assessment processes.
Bespoke Services
Special Schools and Units
Special schools are often advised to utilise universal modes of delivery at WCT. When we provide services, we make sure to track, and outcome measure the impact of universal input. Children cannot always access specialist provisions such as speech therapy and OT. Buying additional services can be costly and often lacks whole-school integration. At WCT, we work with our school partners to make ourselves virtually absolute over our delivery period. We do this by providing training, tool kits, and outcome tools, as well as by upskilling school staff to deliver meaningful and measured interventions at universal and targeted levels of delivery.
We deeply understand how to develop and respond to EHCP delivery. Our Transdisciplinary delivery model supports our support and interventions. Every team member receives a high level of training, interdisciplinary supervision, and support.
This ranges from system frameworks to staff training and development programmes, supervision, and staff growth ventures. WCT provides training and support in developing mastery within a school, reducing dependency and cost on secondary services.
Staff Wellbeing
WCT has a staff wellbeing and mental health support and training service to help schools retain staff, reduce sick leave, and address mental health needs within staff populations.
Training and CPD
WCT’s accredited training provides the science, stats and figures needed to embed a deeper understanding of children, diagnosis and daily access to learning. Beyond this, our training offers a tool kit that staff can use the next day to track change and provide meaningful delivery. Our tool kits are affordable or free to sustain long after WCT has left the building.
We support schools in developing saleable events and hosting training for their wider communities and networks to fund additional training. Some of our partners have used events to raise funds for their organisations.
WCT is creative in utilising funding, finding funding streams, and enabling more meaningful interventions across a school or organisation. WCT has delivered training to over 35,000 professionals and parents. We achieve funding for specific and specialised delivery for 80% of the children accessing WCT services.
Developing a sustainable service for schools
Schools feel the financial constraints of austerity and special educational needs seem to be significantly impacted. WCT has seen the market shift and believes it is our ethical duty to develop partnership schemes with schools and charities to enable effective access to the proper intervention at the right time.
How do we achieve this?
Mainstream schools
We support schools in using their budgets creatively. We have packages of physical education that support the movement for learning. These enable the Teaching and Physical Education team to contribute to the handwriting, attention, mental health, and well-being of all children. We provide both a framework and a deeper understanding of development and learning with a reusable and sustainable lifelong tool kit.
We offer a variety of training courses for teaching assistants and class teachers, tapping into specified (EHCP, individual budget) and unspecified (general training budget) training. Structured training and delivery kits allow skills to be transferred across the team and will apply to other children moving through the setting. They also all come with tracking and evaluation tools to enable staff to evidence the effectiveness of the intervention.
We have mentoring and support programmes for SENCOs, Specialist teachers, TOD’s VI, and MSI, including training the trainer on options for sustainable delivery.
Special schools
Developing in-house services is more sustainable than relying on external and third-party providers. Building an effective therapy team is hard. Staff retention is a big dilemma. WCT offers a rolling support and supervision package. This is entirely bespoke and as far-reaching as developing the entire treatment and management structure to offering some training or management supervision. WCT enables schools to provide attractive development and supervision options for emerging therapists, making an in-house team far more appealing to recruits. Some areas include robust CPD planning, training, treatment packs and assessment tools. Our processes have been written with educators, SENCO’s, specialist teachers, therapists, mental health professionals and clinical managers. That means you can access a wider breadth of knowledge and skills when you access one service.
We provide parent sessions, teaching workshops, and group therapy. Our service has a whole school/organisation process that ensures all team members and parents feel involved, represented and valued.
Partnership model
WCT is very proud of our partnership delivery model. We know that schools don’t have the money for direct therapy and intervention, so we work with schools, families, and funding organisations to create therapy delivery within schools.
This unique and bespoke delivery model enables schools to secure training and supervision services at little or no cost by engaging the wider community creatively and informedly. In some instances, we have enabled schools to develop income-generating services in partnership with WCT.
Many of our school sites do not pay directly for our services but can take advantage of training and support.
Some feedback from our school and charity sector partners
‘WCT increased our budget not our spend, their unique understanding of opportunities actually extended our budget’.
‘We did not realise that we could deliver so many meaningful interventions in school with our existing team. The training not only gave us a more trackable process but our staff felt valued and more importantly skilled to deliver’.
‘Our school has not actually spent any of our budget to access WCT services, the partnership model is a truly unique way of meeting many needs.’
I learnt more in three hours than I have in 12 years of teaching, I felt inspired and able to truly meet the needs of my complex class.’
WCT enabled us to move from fighting fires to a predictive and structured model of delivery, reducing stress, more importantly, helping families feel they were having their needs met.
‘At first, we thought we wanted set hours of speech therapy and OT but WCT enabled us to deliver so much in house that our therapy service is now providing direct specialist treatment! All children have access to wellbeing and development strategies that impact the whole school’.