On Friday 5 July, pupils, families and staff all gathered to congratulate pupils at New Struan School who are graduating and moving on to pastures new.

Last week’s assembly at the school was an assembly with a difference.  In addition to the familiar staff faces, pupils were joined by parents, grandparents, carers, siblings and friends. Following the usual Friday assembly with music and song, everyone enjoyed watching slide shows that captured all the happy times, the achievements and successes of each graduating pupil. After each moving slide show, Head Teacher, Jasmine Miller invited the pupils to come forward to present them with their scroll and personalised memory book.

For one pupil, Donald, attending the graduation was quite a challenge with new faces and changes to the format of the day. To prepare him for the ceremony staff helped Donald to become familiar with the room by encouraging him to take his own photographs. Visual schedules and a countdown sheet were also used to aid Donald’s understanding of the structure of the day.

Donald is now moving on to New Ridgepark, a Scottish Autism service for adults in Lanark. Donald’s parents, Lesley and Bob, spoke to us about the graduation ceremony and his transition to New Ridgepark.

“The fact that Donald was in the assembly for his graduation and filmed the whole thing, going forward to receive his scroll was amazing. This was a challenging event for him but the staff at the school had prepared him well.

Donald has been visiting New Ridgepark with staff from the residences at the school. The visits have gone in little steps until Donald was calmly entering the house and even eating a snack. These visits have been tailored to his needs and comfort zones. The transition programme prepared by the staff at New Ridgepark has given us as parents complete confidence in their understanding and knowledge of Donald. They even had a Dr Who dvd running in his lounge for one of his visits.

There has been great communication between us as parents, the school staff and the staff at Ridgepark throughout the whole process. The enthusiasm of all professionals working to make this move into adulthood as smooth as possible has been remarkable.

The time and effort that has gone into focussing on Donald and making his move to adult services has impressed us. Everything is individualised and the home visits and trips from home have had Donald already meeting challenges successfully.”

We will greatly miss all the pupils who have graduated this term and wish them well for the future.