Principal’s message to families – 28th February 2025
Keep upto date with everything going on at Dawn House School!
Principal’s message to families – 28th February 2025
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Our vision: Working towards successful futures
Pupil Participation Conference- Successful Futures
Our 14th Pupil Participation Conference took place this week on a day that was an INSET day for our pre-16s offering a real conference experience for our 6th form students and all staff. Our keynote speaker was Jacob Dunne, a young man with a sobering story and some real insight into how to turn your life around. Jacob’s story has been performed as a drama, based on Jacobs book, written by the TV show ‘Sherwood’s’ writer, James Graham, at Nottingham’s Playhouse and from tomorrow is showing at the New Vic Theatre in London.
https://eastmidlandstheatre.com/2024/05/10/review-punch-nottingham-playhouse/
Jacob started the conference with his inspiring story. Delegates then joined workshops run by a variety of internal and external speakers and we came back to the main hall to close the day to an amazing presentation by a young man who was a pupil at Dawn House School and left 29 years ago, before we had our 6th form provision. His story told us of all the challenges, positivity and support he has received on his journey to being a happily married software tester. Please read more about the day here
Dawn House School’s Pupil Participation Conference 2025 – Dawn House School
One of our Speech and Language UK national team members joined the day and has shared her highlights:
– The team building workshop – in particular, seeing young people work together so successfully on the ping pong ball maze. They improved really quickly through listening to each other and some excellent teamwork.
– Learning all about regulation of the senses and trying out some sensory equipment in the regulation workshop.
– And finally hearing the lived experience of Jacob and Andrew. It was so inspirational to hear from them about their challenges and how they have overcome them. Their words gave me a lot to reflect on regarding my interactions and practice.
All in all, a great day which we look forward to re-visiting next year, with the intention to include young people from other speech and language schools, as we have done in previous years.
I also wanted to make you all aware of the ‘new’ addition to Dawn House School- Dramatherapy – a creative and imaginative way of working therapeutically.
Dramatherapy is a branch of psychotherapy that supports young people in developing resources to build social skills, self-esteem and confidence. It helps develop emotional, behavioural and psychological resilience. Dramatherapy as an individual or group intervention can promote trust and empowerment, helping young people to feel heard and valued. It can encourage imagination and the ability to reflect on feelings and experiences.
Dramatherapy can help children to communicate appropriately and develop relationships with others; it helps develop identity, autonomy and ease difficult transitions.
As you can imagine this has been a great addition to the therapies we offer at Dawn House School, and the variety gives us the opportunity to offer individuality to children’s experience at school.
In residential news, children in the EcoClub have achieved the “Songbird Survival Award”, improving awareness of the decline of songbirds and making our gardens attractive to them. More about the charity below:
Thank you, Barrie, for sharing your interest.
A big thank you from the Friends of Dawn House for contributions for our Bags to School collection. We had LOADS of bags and made £46! The price we now get per Kilo of clothes has drastically reduced, so this might not sound like much, but EVERY LITTLE HELPS!!!!
The Friends of Dawn House will be sharing our Mother’s day event and information about our Easter Raffle very soon.
Next week we are looking forward to World Book Day, with a Heros and Villains theme, on Thursday 6th March. I’m sure there will be some great photos to share!
In some news from WEDUC “Reach More Parents” we have been advised that SQUID- the online payments portal that parents use to pay for trips and school meals etc, is closing down. We will be moving over to Parent Pay within WEDUC. Hopefully , the move will take place without any interruptions to the service, but there may be a few days when payments are off line.
Squid will close on the 14th March. Please don’t worry if you are in the middle of a payment plan for a school trip- we will keep a record of all payments received through Squid, and set up new payment plans in Parent Pay.
More information to follow once we agree the move over date.
Jenny
