Summer 2015 saw students at Hillingdon Manor sit GCSEs in eleven subjects and one student sat three AS Level examinations.
All our students have a personalised curriculum and may take slightly longer to complete their courses because they access therapies and Life Skills as well academic subjects. Some of our young people do exceptionally well by anyone’s standards, most of our high functioning students will leave with five or more good GCSEs, one student left this year with two A*s, two As, two Bs and two Cs, that would be impressive in any mainstream school and another year a student achieved excellent A Level grades, including an A* in Art and is now at Goldsmith’s College of the University of London.
But it is not just our high achievers of whom we are justly proud, it is the students who have excelled, judged against the only reliable measure of their achievement, their own predicted grades based on assessments at entry to the school.
There are young people at Hillingdon Manor who scrape a G grade in Maths GCSE, not much of an achievement on the face of it, but these are students who have been declared below the threshold of GSCE ability, they should not be able to access a GCSE – but they do! The self-esteem gained from passing a mainstream examination is immeasurable for someone who has been written off by the education system as a failure in a previous placement.
It is part of our commitment to individualised learning that Hillingdon Manor is prepared to provide classes for one or two students to undertake courses which are of particular interest to them. Where expertise is available a course will be run at school. Where it is not, we will attempt to locate it elsewhere and support our student to access it. For example a young person arriving at the school who wished to continue his German GCSE was found a place at a nearby mainstream school and accompanied there by a teaching assistant from Hillingdon Manor.
We are confident that our examination results are outstanding. They may not conform to the definition of outstanding as understood by mainstream schools, but HMS is not a mainstream school. Our mission is to ensure our students achieve the very best they can in spite of or because of their autism.
The success of our alumni is measured not only in their academic results but their preparation for an independent, fulfilled and purposeful life
Lillith Osborn, Deputy Head Teacher