About thirty children use the support room in any term, in groups of four to six, for four periods a week.
Who comes: children whose reading is behind, children who have missed a long stretch through illness or a family move, children who have arrived from another island mid year with a different syllabus behind them, and children who need a subject broken down more slowly than a class of twenty eight allows.
How a child gets there. A class teacher or a subject teacher raises it, the child is assessed by the support teachers, the parents are told before anything happens and are shown what the assessment found. No child goes to the support room without their family knowing why.
What we tell the children, in these words: this room is for getting better at something, and everybody who comes here leaves. About half do leave within two terms.
What we are careful about. The school has two support teachers, not specialists in diagnosing a learning difficulty, and we say plainly when we think a child should be seen by somebody who is. We will help a family with that referral and we will not guess at a diagnosis ourselves.
There is no charge for any of this and it is not something a family has to ask for as a favour.