Pastoral Care

Mrs Clark is a Learning Support Assistant within Solent Infant School, as well as the school’s ELSA (Emotional Literacy Support Assistant) and Family Link Officer (FLO).

Her role is to support parents and carers to ensure that their children can learn positively and flourish during their time at Solent Infant School. Everyone has times when they wish someone was there to offer help when they really need it. There can be times in a child’s life when things get in the way of their learning. A child might struggle for a variety of reasons e.g. they might be experiencing feelings of anxiety, anger or worry or loss.

Types of Support our Family Link Officer can offer:

• Support and guidance – a chance to talk through concerns or problems.

• A link between home and school – by working together we can help your child to achieve in their learning.

• Guidance about things which have an effect on how your child gets on at school - behaviour, attendance and punctuality, routines and organisation, relationships.

• Help with concerns about starting school or moving to another school.

• Support and information about how to get further help when necessary.

• Support parents to develop and maintain a positive relationship with the school.

• Help families and children to access services, resources and local community information.

At the bottom of this page we would like a contact us form as these go to specific staff members.

Family Support Team – aclark@thesolentschools.org

Supporting Service Families within our School

An exciting part of Mrs Clark’s Family Link Officer (FLO) role is to support the Service families within our school. As an ex-service person herself, a military wife and mother of 4 children, her experience and knowledge can be of benefit, enabling joint working to provide the best possible care for our Service families.

One of the initial aspects of the job that she would like to put in place is to gather more detailed information about the Service families at our school. It is important that we know of any planned deployments, house moves, school changes, changes in home circumstances etc so that we can plan and put in place the appropriate support for your children. Please contact the school to share relevant information.

Although we speak about deployments, this of course would include any parent who is absent from the family unit, e.g weekly commuting etc. Communication between school and home is essential to ensure that your child is effectively supported during their time at Solent Infant School.

In this role, Mrs Clark facilitates the following:

• To give deploying/absent parents a Solent Teddy which they can take with them and send us pictures and stories of their travels that we can share either at assembly or in class. 

• School have purchased a range of lovely books that you will be able to borrow to help support your child at home. The themes cover: deployment, worries, loneliness, friendship, changes, behaviour, loss and emotions. 

• To email deployed/absent parents some of their child’s work and any photos of them that have been taken at school during that time.

• If your child is moving to/from another school out with normal transition time, then we would like to support you and your child in planning that move. Some ideas are to create a scrapbook of their time at Solent, also to liaise with their new school and find out more about their new class and teacher etc.

• Once a term we would like to facilitate a “gathering” of our Service families, where we all get to meet each other and play some games, arts and crafts etc.

Any ideas that you have would be greatly welcome. We envisage this taking place between 3.30pm and 5.30pm and would be open to families with children at Solent Infant School, including siblings. These are my initial thoughts and I would love to hear from you with any ideas of what you would like from this role. I am hugely excited about this role in school and very much look forward to meeting you all.

Please see below some useful links: