Education & development
Oasis House is not a school. It is not a bystander either.
Where a child goes to school is decided by their placing authority and the education professionals around them. Almost everything that decides whether it works happens somewhere else.
Many children who need a home like this have already had education go badly. Rebuilding confidence usually has to come before attainment does — and that is the home’s work.
What education actually involves
Four things carry a child’s development. Only the first is the school’s
- The school day A place in a setting, chosen by the placing authority and the education professionals around a child — not by us.
- Everything around it Getting there. Being rested enough to be there. A table to work at, a routine that holds, and an adult who asks how the day went and listens to the answer.
- What a child is drawn to Interests, curiosity, the thing they turn out to be good at. Aspiration is built here at least as often as it is built in a classroom.
- What they can do for themselves Practical capability at whatever level fits — and the confidence that comes with each piece of it.
A school is accountable for the first. We intend to be accountable for all four, and to be able to show a placing authority what has changed in each of them.
When it has already gone wrong
Re-engagement is slower than enrolment, and it matters more
Putting a child back on a school roll is an administrative act. Getting them through the door, and keeping them able to stay in the room, is the work that decides everything afterwards.
Where a child is not accessing education, Oasis House will work with them and their placing authority on re-engagement — a phased return, an interim arrangement, or a long stretch of making the subject survivable again.
Where a child is already attending a school that works for them, the aim is the opposite: to keep them in it. Continuity of setting, staff and friendships is worth protecting, and a placement should not cost a child the one thing that was going well.
The whole range
Education for a five-year-old is not a smaller version of education for a seventeen-year-old
A home whose culture and routines are built around teenagers cannot meet a five-year-old’s educational needs by widening its registration. These are the arrangements the home is designed to cover.
The arrangements below span the full age range, from five to seventeen.
Following a child’s age
- Early years and reception
- Securing a place with the placing authority and the relevant admissions team, then settling-in, steady routines and close contact between home and setting.
- Primary
- Access to and a sustained place at a mainstream or specialist primary school, with attendance, homework, and contact with class teachers and the SENDCO.
- Secondary
- Engagement with mainstream secondary, including SEND support within a mainstream setting, contact with pastoral and SENDCO staff, and the move up from primary where that falls in a placement.
- Post-16
- Sixth form, college and other further education routes — applications, enrolment, attendance, and the shift to a more independent way of learning.
- Vocational
- Vocational courses, apprenticeships and work-related learning, where they suit a young person’s interests and aspirations.
- Employment readiness
- For young people approaching adulthood: CVs, interviews, work experience, and links with training and employment services alongside continued education.
At any point in the range
- SEND provision
- Where a child has, or is being assessed for, an EHCP or another identified special educational need — working with the placing authority, the Virtual School and SEND colleagues so that EHCP outcomes and PEP actions sit inside the child’s wider care plan rather than beside it.
- Alternative provision
- Where mainstream is not accessible — after exclusion, or where school has become something a child cannot face — supporting alternative provision, re-engagement programmes, and any interim arrangement an authority puts in place while a sustainable full-time placement is found.
- Nurture-based and therapeutic education
- Where it is assessed as the right route, supporting access to it — and reinforcing the same trauma-informed approach to learning inside the home.
Oasis House is not an educational provider — it is the household that will have to make somebody else’s provision work, five mornings a week.
Plans and the people who write them
A care plan and an education plan should not describe two different children
Where a child has an EHCP or a Personal Education Plan, its findings will be carried into their care plan rather than filed alongside it — what a setting knows about how a child learns should change how the evening at home is run.
We will attend PEP reviews, keep in contact with a child’s settings, and work with the placing authority, the Virtual School and SEND colleagues so that adjustments actually reach the child in both places.
Progress will be judged from each child’s own starting point rather than against a year group, and reviewed — through care planning, key working, education monitoring, and what the child and the professionals around them actually report.
Interests and strengths
Somebody has to notice what a child is good at
A child who has been told what they are behind at, for years, will not discover what they are good at on their own.
Noticing is a job, and it belongs to the adults who are there every day. Strengths and curiosity will be taken seriously — because self-worth is built out of being good at something and having someone say so.
Achievement will be celebrated at whatever scale it happens — an exam result, a full week attended, or a thing tried that they were frightened of.
Growing up
Independence is not a course. It is a decade of small permissions
For a younger child it is self-care and real decisions at a size they can manage. For an older young person it becomes cooking, budgeting, travel, and the practical business of adult life — the things nobody teaches you.
Where a child’s developmental stage differs from their age in years, what they take on will be matched to where they actually are.
Keep reading
What sits underneath all of it
Planning education for a particular child? Discuss a Future Placement