While Lakeside shares many features with other special schools we all have ways of working – our ethos, principles and practice – that make us unique. We hope this section of the website will give you an insight into the things that make Lakeside, Lakeside. See Our Core Offer here

We believe that communication is key to everything we do with our pupils – without a means of expressing themselves all other education becomes meaningless. So we have embedded Intensive Interaction into our curriculum. Equally as important is the need to give our pupils a physical means to access their education. The MOVE programme focuses us on developing the independent functional movement of our pupils with physical disabilities. Read more about our MOVE programme.

I order to provide the best education possible for our ever growing population of pupils with autism we undertook an audit of provision leading to accreditation by the National Autistic Society -and you can read more on that here. 

It is important that our children are able to explore a variety f creative outlets, through art, dance, and drama. We therefore sought and gained accreditation for this through Artsmark - achieving Gold status. See more on this here. 

Worried about the limitations that life can place on children and young people with learning difficulties we want to open up the world for them as much as possible. We seek to do this in two ways: We are developing outdoor learning because we feel this is a practical and motivating way of working with our pupils – where education can be developed and life skills can be taught in new and exciting surroundings. Read more about our Outdoor Education approach.

We have also taken on board International Education particularly through the Erasmus programme to bring the world to Lakeside – through the means of technology and in person. It is also an excellent way of helping staff develop their own skills by sharing practice world wide.

Our pupils can have challenging behaviours which will be a barrier to them taking a full part in school and community life. These behaviours are rarely deliberate and stem from frustration at their inability to communicate or the stresses and anxieties caused by their autism. Our staff team know that behaviour is in itself a form of communication and seek not to punish but to understand it and find ways to help the child. We have recently taken on the Herts Steps behaviour management programme to support our children in this area.

Our pupils are amongst the most vulnerable in society and so we take our safeguarding role seriously and work alongside our social work teams in this area. Read more about our Safeguarding approach.