The Tor Bank Foundation Department welcomes pupils from Nursery age and provides a fun, friendly, individualised learning experience for each child. Our aim is to foster a love of learning and enable each child to fulfil their individual potential.

We follow the Northern Ireland Curriculum and deliver this in a meaningful way, at a level appropriate to each child’s age and stage of development. Our children love hands-on-learning, learning through their senses, through play and through topics that capture their interests. Each child has a Personal Learning Plan (PLP) with individual learning targets and through structured play, 1-1 work, small group work and indoor and outdoor learning, every child accesses each area of the Northern Ireland Curriculum:

• Language and Literacy

• Mathematics and Numeracy

• The World Around Us

• The Arts

• Personal Development and Mutual Understanding

• Physical Development and Movement

• Religious Education

As our Foundation Stage children begin their learning journey, they not only learn across the formal curriculum but establish foundational functional skills, in preparation for living as independently as possible and being citizens that contribute to their community. Our learning programmes are established in collaboration with the relevant allied health professionals, including Speech & Language Therapists, Occupational Therapists and Physiotherapists.

These foundational functional skills include:

• Functional communication: Staff provide Alternative Augmentative Communication (AAC) strategies and tools, and all pupils have regular opportunities and means to communicate. We support our children to utilise a wide range of communicative strategies, enabling our verbal and pre-verbal children to communicate their needs and wants, make choices and to express themselves.

• Transition Skills: We also develop their transition skills, helping them learn to move between activities and learning areas. Transitions are communicated and supported using visuals and visual schedules, which help our children cope with tricky elements like leaving a preferred activity and tolerating a less preferred activity

• Self-regulation Skills: We introduce the early stages of self-regulation through adult-led regulation and co-regulation. We know the importance of supporting our children to reach the necessary state of alertness for their well-being and readiness for learning, i.e. a ‘calm and alert’ state. Through providing individualised sensory diets, sensory and movement breaks, regulating equipment/resources and access to sensory rooms, our children begin to develop the pre-requisite skills for achieving self-regulation (the ability to achieve the preferred state of alertness for the given situation, including regulating one’s body’s needs as well as one’s emotions).

• Self-help and independence skills: From Nursery onwards we provide opportunities for our children to develop their self-help skills, including dressing skills, toileting skills and self-feeding skills. We also introduce structures that facilitate independent learning, including workstations and structured teaching methods.

We have a range of shared areas that our Foundation Department classes can access which enable us to deliver a variety of learning experiences beyond the classroom. Included in this is our Outdoor Learning provision, delivered across a range of playgrounds (classroom playgrounds, our adventure playpark and our Sand and Water playground) and our Nature Trail. We recognise the benefits of outdoor learning for all children, affirming that it develops children’s well-being and involvement, their urge to explore and make sense of the world and it provides an abundance of learning opportunities.