Our story

Lapwing Education was founded in 2010 as an alternative education provider focused on delivering bespoke 1:1, 2:1 and small group provision to young people with complex additional needs.  Lapwing is a company limited by guarantee and a registered charity.

Lapwing aspire to work with young people (aged 4 to 25) who experience barriers to accessing education, employment and society generally.  We take a holistic approach to all our student programmes and projects, focusing on both personal and academic development wherever possible.  By keeping the young person’s needs, interests and aspirations at the very heart of the decisions taken about their provision, we deliver excellent outcomes for our students. As a consequence, we are growing in the scale and breadth of our offer in order to reach more young people in need across East Anglia.

In the early years most of our students were over 16 years old.  Our bespoke post 16 education programmes are transitional and are usually commissioned annually.  We run 2:1, 1:1 and small group education provision designed to support those students who have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) and are unable to access or maintain a conventional college course.

Since 2014 we have also worked with primary and secondary age students with complex needs.  We still work with young people with learning difficulties and disabilities, but increasingly our students include those with social, emotional and mental health issues.  

Our pre-16 student programmes are often reactive and short term coming in the form of a specialist interim or transitional provision and usually incorporating therapeutic interventions depending on the young person’s situation. We are sometimes supporting a student to reintegrate or transition into an education provision or we are offering a longer term personalised programme to meet the young person’s specific education, health and care needs.

Since 2017 we have gradually evolved into a specialist therapeutic education provision to better meet the needs of our cohort. We adopted the Thrive Approach (2017) to monitor and enable social, emotional and mental health development and we have written our own set of therapeutic competencies (2022) that delivery staff use to guide their therapeutic practice.

Alongside our core education offer, we also run grant funded projects, always with a specific focus and with clearly defined outcomes.  These projects often focus on NEET prevention and youth employment and we have a track record of delivering excellent outcomes within this area. In 2017 we began working as a delivery partner for the Minding The Gap project (funded by the National Lottery Community Fund and European Social Fund) within Suffolk.  As a project partnership, between 2017 and 2022 we re-engaged over 1,100 of the hardest to reach 15-24 year olds who were not in education, employment or training and, through employing a range of approaches and delivery partners, moved them back into education, training or work. We are continuing that youth employment work in Suffolk beyond 2023 through MTG Local, which is funded by the UKSPF.

If you are interested in finding out more about our work please get in touch at enquiries@lapwingeducation.com or on 01473 621762.