Red Balloon Educational Trust – Norfolk aims to support young people who have self-excluded from school for various reasons, including Emotionally Based School Avoidance. Our students often come to us due to bullying, trauma, mental ill-health or Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs that were not able to be met in their previous school. Our provision has proved to be particularly suitable for autistic and neurodivergent young people.
We open in line with our local authority’s recommended term dates to support our parents with other children and work commitments, with students arriving from 8.45am to enjoy breakfast club and leaving at 3pm. Lessons start at 9am, offering a timetable incorporating 30 hours each week.
Students are our first priority
Our ‘intensive care’ programme, referred to as the Red Balloon Recovery Programme, aims to raise a student’s self-esteem, encourage them back into learning and when they have ‘recovered,’ support their return to mainstream education, onto college or entry to an apprenticeship or work placement. These ‘next steps’ are very much decided by each young person. As well as academic studies, we offer gentle and non-intrusive wellbeing and therapy support, which is overseen by our full-time Senior Therapist, Su. One aspect of our Recovery Programme is the time spent on wellbeing, therapy, community, self-reflection, creative arts and social activities. Raising confidence and enabling students to recover their feelings of self-worth provides the basis from which to begin academic learning, relishing personal challenges, setting independent targets and in due course, preparing for external examinations.
A First-Class Service
Our centre is a cohesive team of qualified teachers, wellbeing and therapy staff and everyone understands the ethos of our approach. We aim to restore our students’ sense of self-worth and faith in their peers, education staff and the education system as a whole. Our environment supports and encourages good role models so that students can develop relationships that are founded on active listening, speaking the truth, taking responsibility for their actions and acting with integrity. We treat all our young people according to their own unique and individual needs.
Unconditional positive regard
At Red Balloon, any adult working with our young people offers warm, non-judgmental support so that they feel accepted, valued, respected and appreciated for who they are. All children at our centre have had traumatic experiences, which means they will show their feelings in a range of ways. We understand that behaviour is an expression of feelings and we help them to express these appropriately, moving on to behaving in a respectful and considerate manner. Through our range of therapy and 1-1 mentoring, we encourage our young people to trust their own perception of what is happening, trust that they can manage their own behaviour and appropriately judge how to behave according to the situation presented.
A negotiated curriculum
The learning philosophy on which Red Balloon is best described as negotiating the curriculum. This does not mean that a young person is able to do exactly as they please but instead means that they can negotiate their learning journey alongside staff who are experienced in embedding their interests into the curriculum. Our predominant approach is child-focused and child-directed and whilst we follow the National Curriculum, students are encouraged, for example, to choose which 19th century novel they would like to study in GCSE English Literature classes. We also enable our young people to follow their own interests and this allows them to negotiate a way into a certain subject through project-based learning. A young person may also request a unique choice of studies, such as learning how to play the guitar and this will be facilitated wherever possible.
As we are such a bespoke provision, we do not have a ‘standard’ prospectus, however, our full Red Balloon Philosophy and Practice explains in detail the various ways in which we support our young people and these can be discussed with families who wish their child to attend our centre.