Primary
‘Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’ Benjamin Franklin.
When you visit lessons in our primary phase, you will experience our well-established teaching and learning model, which supports high-quality lesson design and delivery.
A good classroom environment is difficult to define but is essential to a child’s learning. Above all, every child should feel safe physically and emotionally. They should feel confident that they can express an opinion or make a mistake without fear of ridicule or negative consequences.
You should observe a feeling of teamwork between adults and children. Children are allowed to take ‘risks’ (as do teachers) and they are not put off by failure or mistakes (as neither should teachers) but should continue to strive to understand a concept.
Children are enthused, engaged and respond to the teacher’s instructions. You will find the physical environment stimulating, which reflects our pride in the children’s work and achievements and our desire to promote high-quality learning for all.
Our approach to teaching is based around the ‘seven preferred practices’, to develop effective engaged learners. These are:
- No hands up strategies
- Sentence stemming
- A formative assessment rich classroom
- Strong routines
- The teacher is the model, for behaviour, learning and expectations
- Talk partners
- Questioning focused not just on the retrieval of information but on the process (the why and the how)
Primary Curriculum
We aim to prepare all our learners for their next steps in life. Our curriculum and teaching demonstrate very high expectations to ensure all children can fulfil their potential, make progress and have high aspirations, whatever their preferred learning style and aims in life.
Our primary curriculum ensures that all children have the opportunity to access first-hand experiences, engage with visitors, have access to high-quality resources, and enjoy opportunities to learn outdoors. Our location provides many opportunities to work within the community and alongside community partners.
SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural) education plays a significant part in all subject areas ensuring our children excel and become confident learners who strive for excellence. Our own values, British values, school virtues and those values and beliefs of others permeate our subject areas.
The primary curriculum encourages our learners to be resilient, display empathy, be courteous, demonstrate perseverance, be challenged, cooperate, develop friendships, build self-confidence, encourage courtesy, politeness, trust, happiness, safety, honesty and self-control.
We endeavour within our curriculum to exploit and develop enterprise and diversity ensuring children are able to broaden their thinking and aspirations.
We encourage passion for the arts and culture and our community and partnerships.
We highly value our stimulating learning environments both indoors and outdoors, to ensure that children have access to high quality resources, display and learning opportunities to encourage and display a thirst for learning and deepening knowledge.
We are special because we have high expectations and that everyone within our learning community is valued. This leads into the curriculum values within our secondary school where we are fortunate to develop a 5-8 curriculum, teaching and learning model.
Fundamental British Values
We ensure that children have exposure to experiences beyond their local community during which these concepts are shown, through for example, sporting events, residential visits and outdoor centres and through visiting speakers.
We aim to help children prepare to live and succeed in modern Britain. We celebrate other religions, cultures and beliefs, as well as the United Nations “Rights of the Child” Convention. We also teach the core British Values of:
- democracy
- the rule of law
- individual liberty
- mutual respect
- tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs
The School Council facilitates pupils’ involvement in democracy. The teaching and learning of British Values is also supported by our Behaviour Policy, school rules, and through PSCHE (personal, social, health and citizenship education).
Primary School Values
We promote the importance of our primary school virtues throughout all we do in school. Our primary school virtues are recognised and celebrated during assemblies and on social media. Each week, emphasis is given to one particular virtue.
The primary school virtues are:
- Positivity
- Wisdom
- Integrity
- Self-control
- Humility
- Love
- Justice
- Fortitude
- Hard work
- Gratitude