Grouty’s Guide is a Bristol-based SEND education service provider, serving the areas of Bristol, South Gloucestershire and BANES. Currently, we are a close-knit team delivering English, maths and science interventions through 1-2-1 and small group tutoring. Additionally, we offer cognitive testing and reporting, including for Exam Access Arrangements; intervention planning and evaluation; and curriculum mapping and exams support for Functional Skills qualifications.
Inclusion teams are very busy groups in the midst of very busy schools. We pride ourselves on being able to work collaboratively with SENDCos and inclusion teams, anticipating needs, being flexible to change, and supporting students to achieve their best academically. Our relationship with each student is unique, so it follows that each relationship with a school is unique: not every school will require the same support – something we anticipate will vary term to term, week to week, and sometimes day to day anyway!
Why choose Grouty’s Guide?
There are lots of excellent tuition providers in the Bristol, South Gloucestershire and BANES areas – national and local – and yet it’s rare to come across a team who focuses primarily on supporting students and schools with SEND. In order to best support our students and the professionals we work with, there are a number of unique aspects to our offer:
Regular, individualised feedback: SEND teams continually have multitudes of paperwork to complete. For totally understandable reasons (we’re mostly ex-teachers here and have all the respect for everyone working in schools!), when forms are sent out to wider staff teams, they may not come back with the level of detail and specificity desired. Often, this is exacerbated when students miss lessons to attend tuition or have low attendance. Also, in a class of thirty, even if time allows, it can be very difficult for class teachers to gather lots of detailed information on a student or situation. Tutors tend to amass plenty of specific and useful information in regular 1-2-1 settings which can be vastly beneficial; it is for these reasons that our tutors provide detailed feedback on a regular basis (usually once per term) for each of the students they work with. Feedback forms are designed for each individual student and are based on either EHCP targets, the core areas of need, or individual student targets. These continually prove to be exceptionally useful for Annual Reviews, EHCP applications, parent/carer meetings and staff meetings, amongst other things.
Person-centred learning: consistency is an important aspect of tuition; student-tutor relationships are critical to success. That being said, illnesses and life events mean that it’s inevitable tutors will sometimes have to miss the occasional session. Grouty’s Guide tutors are a team, in the true sense of the word, and as much as possible, when a tutor is unable to teach a timetabled lesson, another tutor will cover them, meaning there is no disruption for students. Regular, individualised feedback means that tutors know intimately the specific needs and targets of each of their students and that they are continually tracking their progress and planning for next steps: teaching is truly personalised. Relationships between Grouty’s Guide tutors and their students are effective and supportive and children enjoy our lessons. Furthermore, timetabling and lessons are flexible: students can be taught in school, in their homes or online; they can be taught during term time, out of school hours, or during school holidays; lessons can support the school curriculum or can be a replacement for core lessons if students are unable to attend English, maths or science lessons.
Professional development: Tutors have access to a growing library of a teaching and learning resources; planning support is available for new tutors; tutors are supported through lesson monitoring and frequent meetings with a lead tutor. From September 2021, tutors will have access to a growing bank of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) videos: tutoring is widely accepted as one of the most impactful interventions to support student progress and yet CPD for tutors is hard to come across. This is why Grouty’s Guide are in the process of developing a series of carefully tailored professional development sessions to ensure that our tutors have constant access to critical information and multiple opportunities to continue developing their practice.
