I am delighted to introduce you to City of Rochester School. We provide specialist education for children and young people with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), aged 5 to 18. We are incredibly proud of our unique children, our supportive parents and carers and our dedicated staff where we all work together to make City of Rochester School a safe, happy and inspirational place to learn.

We are a small school offering an individualised and bespoke curriculum that enables pupils to thrive, shaped by our principles of Confidence + Resilience = Success. Our curriculum is both academic, offering accreditation of learning programmes from KS3 through to GCSEs and BTECs in KS4 and KS5 together with the experiential and vocational offering. In addition to mastery of the core subjects such as in English, Mathematics and Science, pupils participate in a range of exciting off-site learning opportunities that support the curriculum for example – horse riding; farm school; forest school and practical and vocational work such as film making, robotics and photography. We are across two sites, the main site accommodating pupils up to sixth form, and our Vocational College for post 16. Pupils from across the school have an opportunity to use the facilities at our Vocational College and learn vocational/practical skills.

Our pupils’ neurodiversity means that we focus on their social and academic development. This is reinforced by powerful pastoral and family engagement programmes. In addition, we have a highly experienced therapy team – for example Speech and Language, Play Therapy, Counselling and Occupational Therapy to address our pupils’ individual needs. Our specialist staff know all our pupils, parents and carers very well and this forms the bedrock of our approach.  The ambition for all our pupils is for them to learn and develop their social skills so that they can embed and apply their learning and create the foundation for further education, training and employment. Where appropriate, work attachments and experiences are provided. We aim to provide holistic learning opportunities with clear outputs and outcomes, working closely with parents and carers to identify and develop the talents and skills of our very special children.

It is our duty and responsibility to provide the right environment to nurture our pupils’ confidence; to give them the necessary skills to be resilient and responsible citizens and to create and celebrate their paths to success.

I extend a warm welcome to you.

Alicja Emmett Headteacher