About Polaris

Curriculum

Development

AMBIT

For parents

For young people

We welcome you to Polaris at Newmarket Academy. Polaris is the Latin name for the North Star; we encourage our young people to shine brightly and we guide them on their journeys to becoming their best selves. We offer unconditional positive regard at every step of the journey no matter how long or how bumpy the road.

We are a small and supportive team providing bespoke and individual education for young people in years 7 to 11 with communication and interaction needs. Our integrated approach offers our young people the best of both worlds: highly individualised support and teaching from communication and interaction specialists, as well as the opportunity to access their entitlement to mainstream education alongside their peers.

Our young people will have communication and interaction difficulties as their primary area of need. These might be:

• Difficulties with receptive or expressive language which impair learning, social understanding and hinder relationship building.
• Difficulties with speech which impair learning, social interactions and self-expression.
• Difficulties with pragmatic language such as understanding narratives, conversations, and indirect exposition.
• Socio communication difficulties which impede engagement in day-to-day social situations and interactions.
• Difficulties with expressing feelings, emotions and needs.

Typically our young people will require support with their social interaction skills, and managing transitions and unstructured times. They may struggle with: rigid thinking, relationship building, understanding and interpreting social situations and mentalising themselves and others. They may suffer from anxiety or from the urge for repetitive actions. To help our young people to grow and develop we offer an immersive experience of socialistion in order to target social cognition and improve social functioning.

Our overarching approach is AMBIT for learning which we are developing with help from the expert AMBIT team at The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. AMBIT is a framework for continuous improvement in practice; we aim to learn from each young person we meet and to improve our practice in response. For more information about AMBIT for Learning please explore our AMBIT for Learning page.