At St Luke’s we have lots of experience educating and caring for children who are adopted or in care and we have a particularly high number of adopted children. We feel we have a good understanding of children’s attachment needs in school and children who are looked after or adopted make good social and academic progress in our care.  All staff receive regular attachment training.

The school receives some funding for each adopted child and we have chosen to spend this money to fund a specialist attachment mentor and this has been very successful for many years.  Carla Ely is trained as an attachment lead.   She is also a qualified teacher.  Carla gives or facilitates support for all children who are in care or adopted. An important part of her role is developing a close relationship with home and gathering the child’s life story so that key information is known early in school and parents or carers do not have to keep re-telling their child’s story. This helps us anticipate a child’s needs better and helps children settle to learn more quickly.

If you are an adopter or foster carer, you may also be interested to read the equality pages as these detail how we try to welcome all family types equally into our school.