The Vision
The Moon Hall vision is to give dyslexic children the best of both worlds: the expertise and focus of a specialist school combined with a broad based mainstream education that is "dyslexia friendly" in all its aspects.
We believe that the best educational environment for a dyslexic child is one which adopts a structured learning approach in small classes and where all educational activities are organised in a way that is responsive to the child's needs.
The ethos and culture of Moon Hall College is a natural extension of the successful formula started by Berry Baker in her home at Ewhurst in Surrey. Then, discovering that her 8 year old was dyslexic, and finding no suitable support locally, Berry set up the original Moon Hall School in her dining room starting with only 2 pupils.
Nearly twenty seven years on and since 1989 based in its own site within the grounds of Belmont School in Holmbury St. Mary, Moon Hall School is a beacon of dyslexic education for junior school children.
Burys Court School was acquired in 2005 to enable us to expand our provision to a wider catchment area and to take it up the age range to GCSE. This was done in response to representations from parents and past pupils who identified a wider need particularly at the senior level. The senior school from Year 7 has been renamed Moon Hall College while the Junior School retains the Burys Court name but the focus throughout is on helping dyslexic children.
Our practice of providing for the needs of dyslexic pupils in all aspects of their education and within normal classes sets us apart from most other schools. It is something that can only be done with an all inclusive whole school approach.
We teach in small classes and groups. Teachers will usually also have an assistant to provide support and in classes we may "team teach". In this way we are able to help the pupils to progress through the curriculum without missing important class lessons in order to have extra one to one tuition.
We have retained the family ethos with which we started. The pupils are known to the staff as individuals and as a result understand they have the care, support and protection of a family within the school. If they have problems they know they can discuss them and will receive a sympathetic and understanding hearing as well as help.
Every pupil, whatever their difficulties, will attempt the core GCSE’s of English, Maths, Science and ICT along with other optional subjects. We have been very pleased with pupils who are showing initially unexpected talents in Art, Drama, Music, Design Technology and Food Technology and in Sport. We expect every pupil to leave with sufficient GCSE’s to get a place in college that matches their ambitions for a future career, to be articulate and to have the social skills needed for life and work.
We can use the example of one child who graduated last year and wanted a summer job before going to College. He wrote up his CV as he had been taught, applied to a business in the field where he wanted to study further, interviewed well, made sure he saved a question to ask later, phoned the company to ask the question so they would remember him and note his interest and was offered the job.
