Admission Criteria

Southgate School is a special school for children and young people with complex needs. Our aim is to provide a specialist educational environment for children and young people who are not able to access a supported place in a mainstream school, despite having received comprehensive provision and support for their complex needs within their previous setting.

Pupils who attend Southgate will have an EHCP with their main needs identified as being significant learning and global developmental delay presenting several years behind expectations. Generally our school caters for pupils who present, at 5 years old, as 18 to 36 months, and will not progress beyond the level of an 8 to 10 year old at 16 when they leave us. It is likely that pupils will also have additional needs, eg medical issues, motor co-ordination problems, mobility issues, epilepsy, autism, specific language impairments and sensory impairments.

Pupils attending Southgate will meet some or all of the following criteria:

• Significant difficulties in all areas of the curriculum in terms of cognition and learning
• Significant issues surrounding interaction and communication
• Significant difficulties with self-care and independence
• Significantly delayed social and emotional development
• A combination of overlapping difficulties and disabilities which results in pupils presenting with complex and multi-stranded learning needs
• Significantly high levels of anxiety which needs high levels of support from well trained, professional members of

These difficulties will be present to the extent that children may be unable to access other provision within mainstream schools in Kirklees.