North Somerset approves funding for special needs

Hans Price Academy will be the home for one of the resource bases

New facilities for children with educational and emotional needs are to be set up at four schools.

North Somerset Council has agreed a £3m package to create three centres for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

The funding will also support a nurture group for children with social or emotional needs.

The investment is part of a strategy to increase SEND capacity in mainstream schools across 13 more schools.

Resource bases will be all staffed with specialist teachers, support assistants and therapists with expertise in speech, language and communications needs and autistic spectrum disorders (ASD).

Speech and language work

The project will include speech and language-focussed work at Hannah More Infants and Grove Junior Schools in Nailsea, and Hans Price Academy in Weston-super-Mare.

It will also include a resource base covering autism spectrum with anxiety at Worle School.

They will be open to all pupils with an educational, health and care plan, regardless of whether they live nearby.

A nurture group, which aims to provide in-school support to pupils with social or emotional needs for a variety of reasons, will be established at Christ Church C of E Primary School.

"We've done a lot of work over the past 18 months to improve the experiences of our young people," said Councillor Catherine Gibbons.

The new facilities are the third phase of the council's SEND Safety Valve programme.