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The Charter School

East Dulwich

Pastoral Support

PASTORAL CARE

Form Groups

All students will have a form group headed by a Form Tutor. The Form Tutor will provide students with a consistent relationship of support, guidance and, where necessary, challenge. Students will see their Form Tutor every day to receive social, moral, spiritual and civic education. Form Tutors will also be responsible for guided reading activities as we cultivate high standards of literacy across our school. We anticipate that Form Tutors will stay with their form groups as they progress through the School.

House System

Our House System reflects our commitment to education on a human scale. School Houses will allow us to build relations with students and between students by providing smaller, more intimate communities within the school. Houses will also be key vehicles for promoting healthy competition, through inter-house academic and sporting competitions and for community service, as well as eventually for building an entrepreneurial ethos across the school.

Tutor groups will be assigned to Houses and students will meet regularly with their Heads of House. House Heads will lead on the development of character and values, in particular, our core attributes: curious, creative, courageous and caring. There will also be opportunities for student leadership, in the form of House Captains and eventually prefects.

Our six School Houses are named after inspiring figures with a connection to our local community. We ran a competition in 2017-18 to determine the names of our school houses.

Support and Nurture

We all find learning challenging at one point or another. At The Charter School East Dulwich we are committed to helping the children in our care through those periods.

One common period of challenge is the move from Primary to Secondary school. This can be hard for anyone but is often particularly challenging for children who haven’t yet met national expectations of achievement or who are in some way vulnerable.   

We assess these children when they join us, in order to determine whether they would benefit from being placed in our Nurture Group. This is a group of students who are regularly withdrawn from specific lessons to receive more tailored support in small groups or by working one-on-one with our learning mentors.  

We place a strong emphasis on Literacy and Numeracy with this group because these are foundational skills that enable progress elsewhere. However, we do not restrict their access to the wider curriculum. 

Children can remain in the Nurture Group for as long as they need this level of support, but we believe strongly in the benefits of full integration into mainstream school life and will work towards that goal at a pace that suits the individual child.

More generally, our commitment to student support is guided by the following principles:

  • Inclusion and support is every student’s entitlement and every adult’s responsibility.
  • Well-tailored support can help any student to make progress in any aspect of their learning.
  • Early identification of needs and careful monitoring of progress is essential to ensuring that the right support is provided at all times.
  • Proactive intervention is always preferable to reactive remediation.