SPAAK Learning Centre offer alternative education options for the education of many of the “hard-to-teach  and hard-to-reach” students that LEAs and schools are responsible for.

These include those that have been placed on reduced timetables, newly arrived to the area, permanently excluded from school and who require more than  20 hours of education each week to meet the statutory obligation.  SPAAK works with many excluded students at Key Stages 3 and 4 either independently or in partnership with schools, Pupil Referral or Reintegration Units in Greater Reading, Hampshire and Newbury.  We have an excellent working partnership with Cranbury College, the recently established education cornerstone of Reading Borough Council’s Children Education Support Service – providing Specialist Support staff and tutoring some of their students at our centre.

Excluded students can also benefit from SPAAK’s online revision GCSE packages.   In January we began providing, at our centre, Year 11 students  from Cranbury College, whose education has been interrupted and who have limited time to prepare for their GCSE exams with a GCSE tuition programme utilising a VLE connected via our hardware. We are confident this will become a model for other clients and mainstream schools maybe interested ultimately in the delivery process and outcome.  Our revision packages are ideal for students who have been excluded or are at risk of exclusion at a crucial stage in their education.
 
Many of those students who are permanently excluded suffer from behavioural problems and SPAAK’s Centre offers a unique learning environment, calm, quiet and stimulating that enables many of these students to engage in learning in a way that has previously been difficult for them.
Our one-to-one approach, supported by laptops with access to online resources offers the centre an ideal way to reach young offenders and re-engage them in education whether they are in a secure unit, at home or in a local authority centre.

At SPAAK it is our aim to offer schools, directly, the possibility of a short-term safety net with a long term strategy for assisting NEETs and young people nearing permanent exclusion, to uphold the inclusion principle.