Therapy

I have worked in education for over 14 years and have experience in primary, secondary and specialist schools. When I undertook my PGCE, I trained with special needs as a specialism and spent equal time training in specialist settings and mainstream settings. Since qualifying as a teacher, I have taught across a variety of age ranges in both key stage 1 and key stage 2 and have led a number of subjects including Computing and PE, as well as being a key stage leader. I have always had an interest in special needs, and I was able to work alongside the SENCo in my previous school and gain valuable experience whilst completing the SENCo award. I then went on to become the school SENCo and was able to use my training and experience to implement new systems and strategies to develop and improve SEN outcomes across the school. 

I firmly believe that education is not only about outcomes but about creating highly skilled and life ready individuals who are ready for the challenging world ahead, regardless of need or background. For me as a leader, this journey through education is fundamental and should be accessible to every child with each having access to the best opportunities to succeed and thrive. I am passionate about supporting young people and genuinely believe in the capacity of all to be successful even where adjustments may need to be made – I know that this drive and commitment to inclusivity and opportunities for all is integral to the role of SENCo. 

Dovecote School provides a truly unique environment, both in the physical spaces that are available to enhance and facilitate educational and personal development opportunities, but also within the skills and experience of the staff team. I am in the fortunate position to work as part of a Therapy Team where our collective skills and knowledge can be used to support our students and their families to ensure that school is a safe and supportive place where they are welcomed and understood. As a therapy team, we are able to support the wider teaching team in having the knowledge, training and resources to ensure that student’s needs are met, and they have the tools and strategies to succeed. An integral part of this success is working closely with our families to ensure that our student have the best possible outcomes. 

I have been teaching in a variety of educational settings for nearly 15 years and started my career as a Drama and Performing Arts teacher in mainstream secondary schools and FE colleges. I have led a number of courses and teaching teams ensuring practice is inclusive and student led with an emphasis on individualised approaches to learning.

My passion became more focused on SEN after having my children and the lived experience of parenting a child who is autistic and the need for advocating for my child.

From then on I have worked within specialist secondary provisions previously and worked as a SEND officer within a mainstream school and specialist provision.  I love working at Dovecote where the therapeutic approach to learning is embedded. I hope to support teaching teams to have the tools and resources to meet the needs of each individual student to ensure they have a positive, safe and fun experience at school, and I look forward to working collaboratively with families.

I am Antonia and I’m the Occupational Therapist at Dovecote School. I qualified as an OT from Cardiff University in 2020.  

I have previously worked in 52-week residential school for autistic children with learning disabilities and additional complex needs. In this role I worked with young people ages 11 years up to 18 years supporting and promoting their participation and engagement in both their education and home lives.  

Before completing my Occupational Therapy training, I had experience working in Dementia Services and Community Mental Health Teams.  

My aim is to build an Occupational Therapy provision that promotes our young people’s meaningful engagement in their learning opportunities as well as develop a healthy understanding of their strengths and needs. I hope this will empower our young people at Dovecote to feel safe having their needs met and feel confident to self-advocate to ensure their needs continue to be met when they move on from Dovecote School.  

I am passionate about embedding a neurodivergent affirming therapeutic model into Dovecote School and advocating for meaningful inclusion.  

I’m Emma and I’m the Speech and Language Therapist at Dovecote. I have previously worked within several  NHS Trusts with young people with a range of strengths and needs, including autism, developmental language disorder, stammering, speech sound disorder and situational mutism.  In my NHS posts I primarily worked with ages 2 years up to 11 years, across mainstream schools, special schools, specialist provisions and clinic settings.

I feel very lucky to have been a part of Dovecote from the beginning. It is a place where students and staff alike are welcomed to be their self.  In my role, I particularly welcome the ability to be flexible in how I offer support, allowing me to fully tailor the provision to each individual.

My aim is to create a speech and language provision which supports our young people to use the most meaningful form of communication for them.

I am passionate about ensuring my practice is neurodivergent affirming, supporting our young people to self-advocate, problem solve and look at different perspectives.  I would like each child to achieve an understanding of themselves, and a confidence to communicate their wants and needs throughout whichever means of communication works best for them.

I’m Kerry and I am one of the speech and language therapists at Dovecote. I have previously worked within a specialist further education provision working with young adults to help them realise their aspirations, maximise their independence and communicative potential. I have worked with a range of students with varying levels of communicative strengths and areas for development including autism, brain injury and alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) users.

After working with young adults, I am keen to work with younger students to bring in intervention at an earlier stage to help remove the barriers to communication and education, helping students reach their goals and ultimately maximise the independence of each individual.

In my 23 years within the profession, I’ve supported a young man with Downs Syndrome and worked for Barnardo’s alongside the Children’s Home Care Team out of Musgrove hospital. This role involved taking children from the hospital into schools and providing respite for their parents and careers and led to working in a primary school in Yeovil supporting a young lady with cereal palsy and her class, for 7 seven years. During this time, I returned to University in the evening and studied for a degree in Early Years. I moved out of Primary school into nursery and pre-school settings, running a pre-school in Chard for 5 years. In this time, I did take a year out to run an office over a very large dairy farm of 3,000 cows but decided it was far too smelly!!

During the summer holiday I went to London and had a fantastic time attending the Theraplay course through Family Futures. This has given me the tools to support some of the Dovecote pupils in activities around play, creative sessions through art, science, cookery and play.  I look at the child’s interests and talk around what they would like to investigate in the play sessions.  I am very excited to be working alongside the team and children at Dovecote School to support the development of early educational experience and play.

Children’s social, emotional, and mental health needs have always captured my interest, as I believe that these must be met before learning can begin. I therefore excitedly took the chance to join the therapeutic team as a SENCO Assistant. Since joining Dovecote,  I have completed my Level  5 Diploma in Specialist Teaching for Literacy-Related Difficulties. I will be working 1:1 with students to support them with their dyslexia needs and also role out bespoke study skills lessons, to support our children in the classroom.

I believe play is especially important for children’s learning. They are given the opportunity to plan, negotiate, adapt, and try again in a secure, controlled setting. Children can develop the fundamental skills that will benefit them beyond the boundaries of the classroom.  It is our responsibility as educators to identify the interests of our students so we can create fun, playful learning activities that are adapted to each student’s needs. This is why I love Dovecote,  we have the opportunity to provide individualised learning opportunities.  Our pupils have the chance to develop into responsible, successful students who can thrive to reach their full potential in an individualised, enriched curriculum.

Hi! I’m Ellie and I am an Occupational Therapy Assistant. Before I started at Dovecote School, I trained as a primary school teacher, before changing paths to work in Adult Supported Living as a team leader. The supported living job ignited a passion for working with those with additional needs, and when I saw that Dovecote School was opening, I had to take that opportunity to be involved! I started at Dovecote School as an LSA, then pursued a previous interest and became an Occupational Therapy Assistant.

Working at Dovecote School has allowed me to see the benefits of a therapy informed approach and taught me so much about my own ideas and thoughts. I love how there are different areas that the students can regularly access, such as the farm, the horticulture area, and the forest school area (the farm is a personal favourite of mine!) I am developing my skills and knowledge in sensory strategies and how best to support students explore what their sensory needs are.

My aim is to support the whole therapy team at Dovecote School, to identify areas of need for our students and help to create engaging sessions where the students can explore their needs and strategies to improve these. Bringing fun into my sessions is very important for me, as it is through play and fun that relationships are built, and our students can be supported to feel safe, secure and special.

I’m a speech and language assistant; this means I support students with their friendship skills, speech, language and communication skills. I work alongside Emma, our Speech and Language Therapist, to carry out detailed initial observations, plan and run training sessions, delivery therapy (ideally in groups or in class) and embed our philosophy through whole-school and whole class support and interventions.

I have lots of experience of working in mainstream schools, specialist provisions and the NHS, both as an LSA and a trained speech and language therapist. I took a break from Speech and Language Therapy to focus on having my 2 children and have returned as an assistant, for now (watch this space).

My philosophy when working with children is to ensure they feel safe, special, happy and to have fun; if I can create that, then they will be more likely and ready to learn new skills. My hope for the children that I work with is that they will become confident communicators, whatever that might mean for them, so that they can advocate for themselves, navigate our social world effectively and reach THEIR full potential, whatever that might look like for them.

Having accessed University as a mature student and scraped through an Honors degree in Psychology and Sociology, I had a long first career in Registered adult social care; in both middle and senior leadership. This gave me a wealth of experience working alongside and managing teams to support young and older adults with a range of learning differences to navigate life. I’m old enough to have been involved in the re-provision of services traditionally part of hospital care, to community care and supported living! Being involved in the final push for re-provision of the hospital care service in the Southwest taught me we can and should do more to support neurodiverse people to access opportunities through education which enable them to fulfill full potential and hopes and wishes.

This prompted a switch from care to education and I quickly started working in specialist education provision – somewhere I could use my skills and experience to best effect. I’ve taught classes of students with complex communication and social needs, including Autism, PDA, Attachment disorder and Trauma and through this became acutely aware of the meaning of inclusion in education. More recently worked as an art tutor and saw the benefits of engaging student therapeutically to support development of social and emotional skills. This brought me to Thrive Approach which has in turn been transformational for my practice and understanding of neurodiverse community. I came to Dovecote in 2022 with a deep and heartfelt understanding of Thrive and the impact it can have for everyone as a teaching tool, as a wellbeing tool and as a tool for life. I’m a licensed Adolescent Thrive practitioner, Thrive Family lead and Thrive trainer. In the last few years, I have worked tirelessly to embed the principles and practice of Thrive into education and am incredibly proud of the way in which we have embedded Thrive into our Needs Met curriculum. We are now a Thrive School of Excellence; celebrating that social, emotional mental health of our students, families and staff. This continues to be a high priority for our Family, Inclusion and Wellbeing team and for empowering resilience in life and learning.

I started my career in Education, as a Teaching Assistant to fit around my own children and have now been working within schools for over 19 years. I have the lived experience of parenting 3 children with a range of needs – ASD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia and as such wanted to know everything and anything linked to their diagnosis. We struggled as a family to be heard and had to fight daily for their needs to be met. I was determined to be their voice when they couldn’t. This has influenced my practice in and out of class assisting other children and parents find their voice.

I am trained as an ELSA, Learning Support Mentor and Childhood Thrive Practitioner and have worked with a range of students with Autism, PDA, Attachment disorder, Bereavement and Trauma. I am passionate about inclusion for ALL children. When I heard about the role of Thrive Practitioner at Dovecote School, I jumped at the chance to move to a more dedicated role that centres on the student’s wellbeing.

I first started working in education in Australia which is when I wanted to make it a career.

Since then, I have worked in several schools in different roles starting out as a LSA working in secondary schools. I took 5 years out of education to become a stay-at-home dad raising two children. This gave me insight into how children develop and how small things can make a child happy, and that’s what I wanted to pass on to the students I work with.

Once my own children were at school, I was able to go back into work where I became a LSA and then soon after a Lead HLTA linked to SEMH and trained to be a qualified ELSA. I knew that this was the area I wanted to pursue and really enjoyed seeing them succeed and knowing I was able to make a difference. This role also meant that I was working with parents, building positive and strong relationships.

I knew the direction that I wanted to head in and when the opportunity arrived here at Dovecote, I knew that it was too good to turn down. I wanted to be in a place where the focus is the students; making sure they can be successful in all walks of life. That is a journey I wanted to be part of.

As a member of the Thrive and inclusion team, I support the students and their families by promoting positive relationships with school and home. I try and encourage a healthy attitude to learning to help our students access education and supporting students build the gaps they may have in their childhood development, and work with teachers and the therapy team to ensure students have all the support they need to achieve their best at Dovecote.

My name is Sophie and I am a part of the Family Inclusion and Wellbeing Team at Dovecote School. I joined the team in January 2024 and have really enjoyed my time at Dovecote. A key part of the role is delivering Thrive sessions to my students and being there to support the students as they navigate their time through school. I am also a point of contact for my student’s families, they can speak to me about any concerns, queries or for general information sharing. I really enjoy working in such an amazing environment, that helps both students and staff to thrive. I would like the students to feel confident and ready for their next steps in life, and to achieve their aspirations.