🌿 Safe Start School
Nurturing Character, Inspiring Growth
Our Vision
At Safe Start School, we imagine a world where every young person — whatever their starting point — has the opportunity to flourish.
We strive to be a community where individuality is celebrated, potential is nurtured, and character is shaped with care.
Our vision is for each student to grow into a confident, compassionate, and capable individual — ready to embrace life’s challenges, contribute meaningfully to society, and lead with integrity.
Our Mission
We believe every learner deserves the opportunity to thrive — academically, emotionally, and socially.
Safe Start School provides a supportive and inclusive environment where students with SEN and SEMH needs are empowered to reach their full potential.
Our mission is to:
-
Equip learners with the knowledge, skills, and self-belief needed for lifelong success.
-
Foster resilience, independence, and personal growth through care and structure.
-
Celebrate individuality and difference as strengths that enrich our community.
Through these commitments, we nurture confident, thoughtful, and compassionate individuals — prepared not just for the next step in education, but for life.
Our Values – The WISER Way
Our core values guide everything we do.
They shape how we learn, how we grow, and how we treat one another.
Together, they make us WISER.
💪 Willpower – The Strength to Persevere
We nurture resilience and determination in every student.
Through challenge, encouragement, and reflection, our learners understand that setbacks are stepping stones to success.
Willpower builds confidence — and the courage to keep going, even when things get tough.
🌟 Initiative – The Drive to Begin
Initiative inspires our students to take action, explore ideas, and lead with curiosity.
Through projects, councils, and community work, they learn that their voice matters — and that positive change begins with the courage to start.
🏆 Success – The Reward of Effort and Growth
True success is found in progress, not perfection.
We celebrate every achievement — academic, personal, and social — recognising that success looks different for everyone.
Every effort counts, and every student can succeed.
💖 Empathy – Understanding and Compassion in Action
Empathy is at the heart of our community.
We teach our students to understand others, communicate with kindness, and respond with care.
Through restorative practice and emotional learning, empathy becomes the bridge that connects and strengthens us all.
🤝 Respect – The Foundation of Community
Respect underpins everything we do.
It means valuing ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
We build a culture where every voice is heard, every difference is appreciated, and everyone belongs.
Our Ethos
Safe Start School is more than a place of learning — it is a community built on trust, empathy, and belief in every young person’s potential.
We celebrate differences, recognise every achievement, and encourage growth in confidence and character.
Guided by our WISER values, we prepare our students not only for success in school, but for success in life — as resilient, compassionate, and responsible individuals.
✨ Together, we nurture character and inspire growth.
THRIVE
The following statement for Safe Start School is our forefront of change in the education system and are aligned to the strategic vision to improve children and young people’s emotional wellbeing and mental health service provision.
Thrive is a transformation framework moving away from the core CAMHS tried approach.
At Safe Start school, we have adopted the THRIVE framework which emphasises the value of building on individual strengths, and places children, young people, and families as equal partners in the delivery of support, help and care.
Safe Start work in the first 2 quadrants of the framework to empower the learners to Thrive within their own community by building resilience and adopting a helping hand model on their journey to their chosen destination to get the right support at the right time.
How will we do this?
Through an individual lens – each learner is supported individually through a trauma informed lens – “What has happened to you” NOT “What is wrong with you”? – thus moving away from the medical model of labeling children and young people.
Through a family lens – how can we work with parents and carers to break the cycle of adverse childhood experiences moving from one sibling to another?
How can we build on a toolkit to educate parents that childhood adversity can impact on the architecture of a child’s development and empower them on putting strategies in place to overcome barriers?
Through a community lens – how can we educate our learners in building positive stress factors and strategies on dealing with contextualised safeguarding hot topics within the community and localities and how to overcome barriers through embedding character education.
We endeavour to:
-
Deliver a structured Thrive aligned curriculum
-
Agree to a Thrive aligned trauma informed curriculum offer and agree a pledge that outlined our vision and values.
-
Offer a value-added education package to our learners to expand and explore thrive within the community for our learners through extracurricular activities and enrichment opportunities.
-
Invest in Safe Start staff and teams to embed our ethos, vision, and values
-
Listen to our Learners and take feedback through the voice of our learners to encompass any improvements and developments within the school
Through the Safe Start program, we focus on addressing the core issues that our learners may have missed out on due to life events that have destabilised their early years, resulting in having additional needs in later years.
We are diverse, welcoming, accepting and passionate about being the best we can be. We encompass the Thrive approach across our whole school practices to ensure we provide our students with the nurture they need to make successful choices.
At Safe Start we believe that no child should be left behind in achieving their hopes and dreams.
