Chapel-en-le-Frith High School

Our school is an 11-16 mixed, community, comprehensive school of around 950 students. We are lucky to be based in a relatively new building, with great facilities, on a beautiful site at the edge of the Peak District market town of Chapel-en-le-Frith. The Peak District National Park is quite literally on the school's doorstep. We believe that our school is unusual in many ways.

Perhaps the most obvious of these is structural. The current school was formed by merging the local area special school (John Duncan School in Buxton) with the existing high school. In our new building, the special school became our current 45 place enhanced resourced SEND provision, always referred to simply as 'learning support' in school.

Our school therefore consists of an average sized comprehensive school that operates like any other, teaching a curriculum that leads to GCSE to over 900 students. Sitting within that school is our learning support provision, the 'enhanced resource'. This arrangement makes for a wonderfully inclusive school with young people who are very accepting of difference.

Our inclusive approach spreads more widely too, and we buck local and national trends by regularly opening our doors to students with difficult and complex backgrounds.