The Willows Primary School is located in Stoke-on-Trent, in an area which is becoming increasingly diverse. Our area is ranked as an area of high deprivation and sometimes some of the families in our community struggle to make ends meet. Our curriculum seeks to remove the barriers that these circumstances might bring.
In our Early Years this means we focus on making sure our children are confident talkers and on developing the foundations of Early Reading through systematic teaching of Read, Write Inc phonics and sharing our love of stories and books. We have built our school environment to best enable the early years children to strengthen their core muscles through physical play. They develop through wonderful, exploratory, sensory experiences in our mud kitchen, giant sandpit and woodland area. The children are supported to learn to work together, manage their feelings and ask questions through skilled adult facilitated play. The children learn nursery rhymes and develop their mathematical thinking through direct teaching based on maths mastery and exploration.
Through school we believe that our students deserve a curriculum that gives them improved life chances by enabling social equity and mobility. We start with a focus on the foundations of English and Maths throughout school, ensuring children experience a broad rich vocabulary; share wonderful stories and books; and are given opportunities to develop a deep understanding of maths concepts through systematic teaching and practical exploration. We use technology creatively to build fluency through practice, increase engagement, and allow us to look back at previous learning so we can see how it builds over time. Our school blog on our website also gives our families a window into our learning.
Throughout school we want to build in experiences our children might otherwise not have the chance to experience; trips to the beach, to theatres, forests, farms, and even visits abroad. We want them to experience campfires, den building, to find out what it’s like inside Ford Green Hall and we access the wonderful parks and natural environment on our doorstep, for example Trentham Gardens. We grow our own fruit and vegetables in our polytunnel, and our children explore learning outside in our Woodland Outdoor Learning lessons.
We are proud to be from Stoke-on-Trent and want to learn about the rich heritage of our city, the pottery industry and the Spode family home (The Mount) which is part of our school. Alongside our CUSP curriculum, we learn how it has been part of the history of our country through the war, its influence through creative arts, music, sport and poetry.
We seek to lift up our children’s eyes to widen out their view of their world.
We are also proud to share that there are 37 spoken languages within our school, and so we must teach our children to become respecters of different cultures. They grow to understand what we have in common, to know about different faiths and to be accepting of all our school community. Our MFL curriculum allows us to explore and learn a common language and culture.
Many of our families have not themselves had experiences of higher education. We want our children to be informed to choose what options are open to them and whether this is a route for them. We aim to build resilient, questioning learners, who are prepared to try things new and know its ok get things wrong: we learn from our mistakes. Our children leave The Willows having been able to explore different career paths and having learned how to express themselves effectively. We recognise the importance of the children attending school every day and teach this to them and their parents explicitly. We focus on self-regulation as a key skill for life and teach that explicitly. Our PHSE curriculum underpins all that we do.
At The Willows, we strive to instil a love of fitness and sport in all children and work to enable them to find their own passions and strengths through a range of sporting opportunities. Our weekly tabata sessions give children an equipment free way to keep fit for all abilities where they can see their fitness improve week on week. We are proud to have teams in a range of sports where they compete across our town and across the city. These include tag rugby, indoor sporthall athletics, football, cricket, rounders, athletics and cross country. We celebrate children’s ‘in school’ and ‘out of school’ successes via our monthly newsletter and at the end of the year via our Sports Awards Evening. We work closely with Stoke City FC and other primaries across our town to give our pupils at The Willows the best opportunities and experiences.
Statistics show us that the reality is that children and teenagers in our area are vulnerable to criminal exploitation, gang culture, alcohol and drug abuse. In that context it is crucial that our curriculum teaches children how to stay safe and give them the tools to make choices which change their community. This starts in Early Years with an understanding of private parts and appropriate touch using the NSPCC Pantosaurus material building over time to a sophisticated understanding of the dangers of grooming for our older children.
For example, annual attendance at the Safe and Sound workshops make sure that our oldest children understand the implications of knife crime and gangs and our digital leaders discuss the pitfalls and dangers of social media. Local police work with groups of children to look after our community and become trusted adults. Our exploration of carefully chosen texts and themes helps us make connections and ask questions about how things work in our own community.
Our curriculum builds on big ideas and concepts so that children have the knowledge and skills to look wider than their immediate context and make different, aspirational choices. We are delighted to be working with Unity Schools Partnership and have adopted their curriculum known as CUSP (Curriculum with Unity Schools Partnership) which is underpinned by the very latest research evidence from education and the field of cognitive science.
Underpinning all this all of our staff have had training in Attachment and Trauma Sensitive approaches and use the language of growth mindset and self-regulation to enable our children to access learning effectively.
The impact of all this is that children leave The Willows having achieved excellent academic standards, but also prepared as fluent, resilient, ambitious, lifelong learners ready to thrive in the next stage of their education.
The Willows Primary – Explore, Dream Discover