School Service
WCT has a whole team lens for understanding the whole child. WCT knows that schools and children’s services experience many challenges in their ability to develop, deliver and sustain meaningful services for children with physical, emotional or mental health needs.
WCT works at an international level with a variety of children’s services to include Local Authorities, nurseries, school, hospices, children’s homes, charities, community services, mental health services, PRU’s and Virtual Schools. With the aim of supporting organisations to develop sustainable, ethical and evidence based service development tools and frameworks.
WCT has designed and delivered 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. We know children are not always able to access specialist provisions such as speech therapy and OT. We also know that buying in 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 period of delivery. We do this by providing training, providing tool kits and outcome tools and by upskilling school staff to deliver meaningful and measured interventions at universal and targeted levels of delivery.
We have a deep understanding of how to develop and respond to EHCP delivery. Our support and interventions are supported by our Transdisciplinary model of delivery, every member of our team is provided with a high level of training and interdisciplinary supervision and support.
ranging from entire system frameworks, 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 also has a staff wellbeing and staff mental health support and training service aimed at supporting schools in staff retention, reducing sick leave and supporting mental health needs within staff populations.
Training and CPD
Our accredited training has been developed by a fully integrated transdisciplinary team. ALL of WCT’s training provides the science, stats and figures needed to embed a deeper understanding of children, diagnosis and daily access to learning.
Beyond this all of our training provides a ready to use the next day tool kit for staff to use, 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 managed to use events to raise funds for their own organisation.
WCT is creative at utilising funding, finding funding streams and enabling more meaningful interventions across a school or organisation. In the academic year 2021/2022 WCT delivered training to around 4000 educators, professionals and parents. We achieved funding for specific and specialised delivery for 82% of the children accessing WCT services.
Developing a sustainable service for schools
It’s widely known that schools are feeling the financial constraints of austerity, and special educational needs seem to be an area significantly impacted. WCT has seen the shift in the market and felt it was our ethical duty to develop partnership schemes to work with schools and charities to enable effective access to the right 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 supports the movement for learning. Enabling the Teaching and Physical Education team to contribute to handwriting, attention, mental health and wellbeing of all children. Providing both a framework and a deeper understanding of the development and learning with a reusable and sustainable lifelong tool kit.
We have a variety of training courses that can tap into specified (EHCP, individual budget) and unspecified training (general training budget) for teaching assistants and class teachers. Structured training and delivery kits mean that skills learnt can be transferred across the team and will be applicable 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, MSI. To include training the trainer options for sustainable delivery.
Special schools
We know that developing inhouse services is more sustainable than relying on external services and third party providers, we also know that 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 as far-reaching as developing the entire treatment and management structure to offering some training or management supervision. We know that WCT enables schools to provide attractive development and supervision options for emerging therapists making an inhouse team far more attractive to recruits. Some areas include robust CPD planning, training, treatment packs and assessment tools. Our processes have been written in partnership with educators, SENCO’s, specialist teachers, therapists, mental health professionals and clinical managers. That means when you access one service you have access to a wider breadth of knowledge and skills.
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 model of delivery. We know 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 being creative and informed in how to engage the wider community. 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 are able to 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’.