Personal Development
At Egglescliffe CE Primary School, our personal development programme has been designed to enable all children from Nursery to Year 6 to ‘shine’. Personal development is both a subject and a school ethos. It is reflected in our school motto of “Let your light shine.” and in our school values: Love, Hope, Trust and Friendship.
Mental Health and Wellbeing
We are firm believers that a positive, growth mindset and healthy body enables us to learn and progress. To promote a healthy lifestyle, we provide a comprehensive PSHE and RSHE programme. From Nursery to Year 6, every child will progressively explore relationships, growing and changing, and how to keep safe. Through this learning, children will gain an understanding of how to lead a healthy lifestyle and understand that they can make choices including how their choices can impact their lifestyle. Children know what they need to learn and how their wellbeing affects their learning.
To promote mental health and wellbeing further, we have a trained Mental Health First Aider, who is also our THRIVE ambassador. Through their role, they talk to the children about their feelings and emotions. The children know that they can speak to our Mental Health First Aider if they need someone to talk to. Our Mental Health First Aider also provides further support to children, who seek supplementary nurture and support, as and when required. We have targeted nurture groups for children to access to complete mindfulness/wellbeing activities If children have anything they would like to share, we have yellow post-boxes in different locations throughout the school, where they can post their thoughts or wishes. The post-boxes are checked daily. Anything that is posted is then followed up by our Mental Health First Aider.
Annually, we celebrate ‘#HelloYellow’ on World Mental Health Day. This day is to highlight to the children that how they feel is important and that the people around them care about how they feel. On this day, we have also launched, with the help of our Friends of Egglescliffe, a ‘Big Community Breakfast’. All the children and their families/carers are invited to have breakfast together before school starts.
Inspirations and Aspirations
Our aim is to inspire our children so they can ‘let their light shine’. To inspire and enable aspirations to prosper, we have a plethora of activities and events for the children to participate in. Our STEM ambassadors, organise a STEM week. Throughout the week, visitors with STEM careers are invited in to talk to the children about their occupations and the steps involved to enter the role. We organise visits to different workplaces so the children can see various careers in action. This is all possible due to our strong parent/carer-partnership which raises the profile of careers available in our local area and beyond. During our planning for the events mentioned above, we make strategic plans and efforts to utilise this time to promote equality and reduce gender stereotypes. We aim to reduce all possible stereotypes and potential discrimination through our personal development programme with workshops from Middlesbrough Football Club, Show Racism the Red Card, and welcoming local Paralympians into school.
Termly, each class has a planned experience not only for their enjoyment but also to inspire them. Experiential learning is important to our school and its values. We believe that this is something that should not be taken for granted and that all children should have the opportunity to participate.
Our PE curriculum is designed to create a plethora of varied experiences for the children from Nursery to Year 6. Every child has a variety of opportunities to fulfil their minimum of 2 hours experience per week. To facilitate this further, our after-school club offering is organised to provide a variety of diverse experiences for the children to explore new hobbies and interests or to progress and refine their skillset in their desired discipline. Our clubs are open to all children from EYFS to Year 6. Not only do the children learn new skills and develop a new passion, but this is also an opportunity for them to build their social skills by developing their communication/language skills and building relationships. With our links with Middlesbrough Football Club, we can provide enhanced provision for children with SEN needs. We have also invested in our own school environment to develop a sensory area, nature garden and other provision for all our children to access.
Citizens who Contribute
Developing citizens who have a positive impact and contribute to our community and society is fundamental to what we do. As a Church of England School, we have strong links with our local church, St. John the Baptist. The Reverend from the church delivers Worship for the children on a termly basis. Every child in our school visits church every half-term to participate in Encounter. During this time, the children learn about Bible stories, sing hymns and create prayers. They also learn about current affairs that are happening in the world to make reflections on how they can provide help and support. Similarly, we have Prayer Space every Wednesday at school which is led by a Worship Lead from St. Paul’s Church. Prayer Space focuses on a news story from Picture News to help the children to apply our school values to create reflections and/or prayers. At school, we value and actively discuss how children in our school may be of non-faith or follow a different religion than Christianity. We endeavour to provide children with the opportunity to engage with views, beliefs, and opinions that are different from their own, in considered ways. As a result, children at our school understand, appreciate, and respect differences in the world and its people. We celebrate commonalities as well as differences.
We value our children’s rights and treat everyone with respect and dignity. Every child has the right to express their views and opinion, we plan opportunities for children to learn about their own views and opinions as well as those of others so they can discuss and debate issues in a respectful and considerate manner. British Values impact our decisions at school. we have a plethora of student leadership opportunities as well as our School Council. Before any child becomes a leader or councillor in our school, they must apply for the role through a democratic election process and be elected for the role. We do not have restrictions about who can be part of the election or who wins the election because we believe in equality.
When planning and monitoring the curriculum, every subject leader and our academy councillors conduct pupil voice activities which are actively acted upon, and implemented, if necessary. Our curriculum has been designed to deepen their understanding of their locality as well as the world around them. Opportunities to learn about different countries, cultures, religions, and ethnicities are utilised. Our PSHE curriculum, allows children to learn about economics to understand money, budgets, and making decisions involving money. We hope this provides the children with greater insight into socio-economics and how it impacts society. To embed economic knowledge, we have opportunities for children at our school to embark on enterprising projects. Examples of this are, at our school fairs, we set a budget to make our craft to see who can make the most money, sponsored events and fundraisers which children organise to raise enough money to be able to create their project.
