Almost all of our students live at home with family when they join the College. A small number live with other carers. The process of College admission, agreeing the courses to be taken, managing the EHCP, transport and many other matters are complicated and of course rely to a considerable degree upon family and carers. It is obviously in everyone’s interests that family and carers are involved, kept regularly and accurately informed and understand what the College are doing and why.
Where problems arise we do our best to solve them jointly with the student, their family and carers. We also provide termly parents evenings, Coffee Mornings, parent training and celebrations events every year to support families and carers with keeping up to date with changes to the systems and rules that affect the student, developments in how the College provide their services and opportunities to learn about new ideas and methods.
We use a Home-College planner system to aid communication and to arrange meetings. Family and carers are of course fully involved in the reviews and can ask for a meeting whenever one is needed. We undertake a wellbeing survey every year to check on the overall health of our relations with Students, families and staff morale. We have a complaints and compliments policy and we welcome all constructive criticism.
We don’t assume that the College and family/carers will necessarily agree about everything. Life just isn’t like that! As our students are all adults in law, sometimes there can be differences in Best Interests matters. In the rare occasions that this can happen we talk it through with the student, their family and carers openly, so that our thoughts and recommendations are clear and well set out, logical and sensible.
There is a Student Voice body with regular meetings where students can make their voices heard and make recommendations to the College about any matter affecting College life.
