Empowering Every Learner, Building Skills for Life
Nurturing potential, inspiring progress, and helping every learner succeed both in school and beyond
About Us
Silver Birch School is a specialist independent school providing education for young people aged 11–16 who have social, emotional, and mental health needs, autism, communication difficulties, or cognition and learning challenges. We offer a supportive and structured environment where every pupil is encouraged to grow in confidence, develop essential skills, and reach their full potential.
Our vision is to create an inclusive, nurturing, and aspirational learning community where pupils feel valued, understood, and inspired to achieve. Like the silver birch tree — a symbol of strength, adaptability, and renewal — we believe in helping our learners build resilience, embrace their individuality, and flourish in life beyond school.
Additional Vocational Options
Mechanics
Hair & Beauty
Health & Social Care
Construction
Why Choose Us?
Personalised Learning
To deliver a flexible and individualised curriculum that meets the educational, vocational, and therapeutic needs of each pupil.
Holistic Development
To support the emotional, social, and behavioural development of every pupil through high-quality pastoral care and access to specialist support.
Positive Futures
To raise aspirations and ensure each pupil is supported to make informed, realistic, and ambitious choices about their future education and employment.
Educational Excellence
To provide a broad, balanced curriculum with additional vocational options.
Inclusive Environment
To foster a safe, respectful, and inclusive culture where all pupils feel valued, listened to, and able to express themselves.
Individual Encouragement
We believe in empowering our students to overcome challenges, adapt to change, and flourish in their own unique ways.
A Warm Welcome from Our Headteacher
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to Silver Birch School. The school is a DfE registered, independent, specialist day school in Burnley. Our school provides high quality education for pupils aged 11 to 16 years. Pupils have a range of needs, including social, emotional, and mental health, autism, cognition and learning and communication difficulties. Silver Birch School is committed to developing pupils as individuals, enabling them to achieve their full potential.
School Vision
Our vision is to create an inclusive, supportive, and aspirational learning environment where young people are enabled to reach their full potential.
The silver birch tree, known for its strength, adaptability, and renewal, symbolises our commitment to nurturing growth and independence in every learner. Just as the silver birch thrives in diverse environments demonstrating strong resilience in the face of adversity, we believe in empowering our students to overcome challenges, adapt to change, and flourish in their own unique ways.
Our motto "Empowering Every Learner, Building Skills for Life” empowers us to equip every learner with the skills, confidence, and resilience needed to succeed in further education, employment, and adult life.
A Message from Our CEO
As Chief Executive Officer, I am delighted to welcome you to Silver Birch School, a nurturing and inspiring environment where children can thrive academically, socially, and personally.
Our school does not offer a 'one size fits all' solution. Instead, we provide a bespoke package tailored to meet the individual needs of each pupil. We work alongside our pupils, parents and professionals to equip both students and staff with the tools, skills, and knowledge they need to be their very best. My personal aim is to create learning communities where every individual is supported to achieve their full potential, and personal successes are celebrated.
As CEO, I am incredibly proud to lead such an innovative, passionate, and caring family of schools, of which Silver Birch is an important part. I warmly welcome everyone to visit and experience first hand the wonderful learning opportunities that our pupils get to experience every day.
Our commitment to excellence, collaboration, and personalised support is evident in everything we do, and I am confident that you will see the positive impact of our efforts on the pupils, families, colleagues and our wider community.
New Beginning
Edward Smethurst- Proprietor
Ultimately, choosing the right school for a child will be a life changing decision. Ensuring it is a good decision is critical. We know that parents and carers want a high standard of education for their child to make good progress, in an environment where they can be happy and safe.
Prosperity Children’s Services are well known for supporting children and young people, with a range of needs and difficulties to be cared for and well supported in a range of different settings. We embrace our duty to support children to engage in education. Sourcing suitable schools or learning provision has been a huge challenge for us and for local authorities.
Our staff team is highly experienced, suitably qualified and trained. Ultimately, they recognise and embrace the challenges associated with supporting pupils who have experienced disrupted education, have gaps in learning and whose needs were not met previously. We make it our business to support our staff team, to ensure their own well-being, so they can work effectively and remain passionate about making the difference.
We know that good quality, relevant education is key to improving pupil progress, personal development, well-being, and overall life chances. Our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum, with some great additions, including careers for all, independence, and enterprise skills. Pupils in each Key Stage can pursue personalised, appropriate programmes of learning, including academic and vocational pathways.
Your decision to choose our school for your child will be supported by us throughout your child’s time at Silver Birch School. We will work closely with you as parents, carers, and local authorities to help ensure your decision was the right one
We work collaboratively with our therapy team, being part of the therapeutic web around the child. The enhances our trauma informed and trauma responsive approach, building a safe and secure environment for our children to be able to access learning. We incorporate principles from the PACE model (Hughes 1997), further enhancing our trauma informed and attachment building environment; promoting ‘connection before correction’ to enable our children to engage in situations with more tolerance. Also maintaining our child-centred focus (Rogers 1957), weaving in acceptance, congruence and a belief in each of our children to achieve to their full ability.
Please do contact us at any time, we look forward to meeting you.