Inclusion

At Richard Alibon we keep a clear focus on each and every child – their individual safety, well-being and progress is important to us. We want all our children to make excellent progress in school both socially, developing the skills they need to be productive citizens and academically so they can be successful lifelong learners.

Your child’s class teacher will be the most important person in ensuring your child is set work at the right level which challenge them to do very well. However we also use support staff and senior leaders to provide support for children to overcome barriers to their learning. Children with special educational needs are catered for within their own class and, when appropriate, may be withdrawn for short periods to work with a specialist adult, individually or in a small group. Similarly, children who are identified as gifted or talented, demonstrating a particular aptitude in a curriculum area, will be given opportunity to extend their learning in class or beyond the classroom. We also have staff who support those children who arrive with little or no English. The school also has a strong track record in ensuring disadvantaged children thrive and do well with us.

Equality

At Richard Alibon we are committed to valuing diversity, tackling discrimination, and promoting equality. Our strong set of school values and behaviour code ensures our children develop a healthy respect for each other and enables children from a wide variety of backgrounds to work successfully together. This is one of our school strengths.

We aim to provide an education which is sensitive to individual needs and accessible to all children regardless of special educational need, disability, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and belief. The school promotes a good awareness, understanding and respect for diversity in our world. This is achieved through the celebration of special days and festivals; an awareness of national and global issues and teaching children how to deal with any incident of inequality or discrimination.

The school complies with the public sector Equality Duty (PSED) which requires public bodies to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between different people when carrying out their activities.

The Act explains that having due regard for advancing equality involves:

  • Removing or minimising disadvantages suffered by people due to their protected characteristics.
  • Taking steps to meet the needs of people from protected groups where these are different from the needs of other people.
  • Encouraging people from protected groups to participate in public life or in other activities where their participation is disproportionately low

The Act states that meeting different needs involves taking steps to take account of disabled people’s disabilities. It describes fostering good relations as tackling prejudice and promoting understanding between people from different groups. It states that compliance with the duty may involve treating some people more favourably than others.

The equality duty covers the nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.  Public authorities also need to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination against someone because of their marriage or civil partnership status.

The school’s accessibility and single equalities plan can be found here:

Richard-Alibon-Single-Equalities-Plan-January-2021- 2024 published