New secondary specialist schools opens

Riverside School, a newly-built Haringey secondary special school, co-located on the Wood Green Inclusive Learning Campus with Woodside High School, held its formal opening ceremony last month.

The school invited speakers and special guests with strong connections with Moselle and William C. Harvey special schools. The secondary departments of these schools were amalgamated to create Riverside School. Speakers included Councillor Sheila Peacock, Deputy Mayor of Haringey and Henry Nguyen, a former Riverside student.

A large audience came to the ceremony, including governors, Woodside colleagues, Penoyre and Prasad the school architects, Apollo the building contractors, ex-colleagues and council staff, and ex-students and friends of the school. The opening ceremony was followed by a tour of the school.

Riverside was built as part of Haringey's Building Schools for the Future programme and first opened its doors to students a year ago, but the school wanted time to settle into their state-of-the-art accommodation before formally welcoming guests.

Riverside provides 120 places for 11-16 year old students with a wide range of moderate, complex, severe, profound and multiple learning difficulties, including those who have emotional, language and communication needs and students with autism.

Hosting the ribbon-cutting event was Riverside's Headteacher, Martin Doyle, who said that after a year, the new premises had fully developed into a "perfect learning environment for students."

Martin said: "There is a unanimous sense among all stakeholders in Riverside's school community, including parents, that the new school could not have been better designed and built to meet all our students' needs. The school will be able to ensure that our motto, 'Learning to Live Life to the Full' can be applied successfully to all."

Martin also referred to the school's first Ofsted inspection, carried out in the previous week. The inspectors were very positive and the report has since been published. It praises the school for its rapid progress since opening with an overall judgement of 'Good' and an 'Outstanding' judgement regarding students' behaviour and safety.

Taking on an important role at the ceremony was former student Henry Nguyen who now attends Haringey Sixth Form Centre. Henry has visited Riverside on a number of occasions since leaving last year and described the new building as "great".

He said that he missed the staff and students both at Riverside and Woodside, adding "and they miss me, they are all good friends of mine."

In addition to 16 core classrooms Riverside's specialist features include:

• A hydrotherapy pool
• Multi-sensory and dark rooms
• A physiotherapy treatment room
• Specialist teaching rooms for art, music, life skills and ICT
• A hall/gym roof terraces
• An outside cycle track
• A medical and therapy suite