Surrey Square Primary School

[EduCativ]

Welcome to our School. At Surrey Square, we aim to give our amazing pupils the very best. Our mission focuses children and adults on the high expectations we have of our school community. Our core values define our ‘personal excellence’ and are the backbone of the school, shaping our curriculum and pedagogy, and guiding our behaviors.

Surrey Square is an exciting place – and our best asset is our pupils. Buzzing with energy, they are at the heart of everything we do, and meeting their needs is our sole focus.

At Surrey Square, we believe that children can achieve personal excellence through the teaching and modeling of values and skills. Our 7 values – Responsibility, Respect, Enjoyment, Community, Perseverance, Compassion, and Excellence - drive and shape every aspect of school life, and have taken the place of school ‘rules’. Our work in this respect has been acknowledged by many visitors (including, repeatedly, by Ofsted).

We do not judge or get angry with children when they come to school not able to read or write – we set about using our professional skills and experience, love and energy, to do everything in our power to ensure they learn those things. So why should it be any different if what the child needs to learn is about how to speak appropriately to an adult, or how to manage themselves when they feel upset or embarrassed? Why would we as an institution simply expect our pupils, coming from such challenged backgrounds in so very many cases, to know this stuff, and get angry with them when they didn’t? Surely, in the most fundamental way, if they don’t know ‘how to behave, then it is our job to teach them?

Children have got to have the ability to make decisions and choices themselves about the best way to behave in a situation. We will not always be there helping them to think it through. That is the key difference in our approach to values-based learning rules prescribe a set of appropriate/inappropriate context-specific behaviors (e.g. walk in the corridors), whereas values give a set of aspirational guidelines within which children must choose the right behavior in any context.

Our vision is summed up in our mission - ‘Personal and academic excellence everyone, every day.’ For us, the ‘and’ is a critical high attainment in core skills is a pre-requisite for success in secondary school, and beyond. However, just as important are the other skills – the ability to ‘self-manage, to communicate clearly with others, to know who you are, and to have ambition. We define this as ‘personal excellence’ and actively teach our pupils these skills, sing the core values as a framework. We passionately believe that the circumstances of birth should not be the key determining factor in success in life and are immensely proud that ALL children achieve well at Surrey Square, regardless of their socio-economic, ethnic, or gender status.

At Surrey Square Primary School we believe in making all learning purposeful and meaningful. We do this by teaching the national curriculum and personal excellence curriculum through the use of REAL projects. REAL means:

• Rigorous
• Engaging
• Authentic
• Learning

Projects are rigorously designed and planned to cover all aspects of the national curriculum whilst at the same time providing a rich, real-life learning experience. This way of learning allows our students to develop their self-confidence and creativity, as well as develop skills that prepare them for a world outside of school.

Surrey Square is one of the 9 schools that serve the Aylesbury Estate in South East London. Just a mile from the River Thames at London Bridge, it does seem a world away. The Estate is the largest in the country, and the high-rise blocks can be a foreboding sight. Channel 4 has an ‘ident’ that uses images of the Estate, giving a very negative perception.

Our school serves ‘the global majority since 90% of pupils are from non-white British heritages. A large number of our families hail from West Africa, and we also have families from Bangladesh, Somali, Algeria, Peru, Columbia, Poland, Jamaica, Lithuania, Pakistan…and many other places! We are immensely proud of our community that works and learn together in an atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance. Our Identity curriculum supports this ethos, through the explicit teaching around what it means to be British and exploring different beliefs within the framework of our core values.

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