Vicarage Nursery and Primary school is a welcoming, happy and caring school. Our school motto ‘Be the best you can be’ reflects the high aspirations we have for our school community. Our aim is for our children to enjoy their time at school, develop a love for learning, become responsible citizens, and achieve their potential. We offer a rich creative curriculum with a clear emphasis on teaching the basic skills through exciting and engaging learning opportunities. We are also very proud of our learning environment both within and outside the school building which is purposeful, vibrant, and of a very high standard.
We have established close working partnerships with parents and families to ensure there is mutual understanding and support to meet the needs of our children and the community we serve.
The work carried out in classrooms is further enhanced through our offer of a wide range of out of school and extra-curricular activities, so that children’s interests and talents in a range of subjects including Sport, Music, Computing and the Arts can be nurtured and developed.
We aim to:
- Provide a vibrant, secure, and stimulating learning environment in which our pupils develop confidence, resilience, and a love for learning.
- Provide a rich creative curriculum that is enjoyable, purposeful, and meets the needs of our pupils.
- Maintain high standards of teaching and learning so that all pupils can achieve their potential.
- Respect and celebrate the religious and cultural diversity within our school and the wider community.
At Vicarage Primary School we are very proud of our SEND provision. The SEND team comprises of an Assistant Head/Inclusion lead, SENCO, Specialist Teacher for Dyslexia/SEND Support, and several Teaching Assistants who support some of our most vulnerable pupils 1:1. The team works closely with the Learning Mentors, School Nurse, Health Visitor, and Designated Safeguarding Lead to support pupils with Social-Emotional, and Mental Health issues, Child Protection concerns, and Health issues. Vicarage Primary School is a Centre of Excellence for Inclusion & SEND and therefore has a wider responsibility to schools in Newham and across London to support schools regarding SEND.
At Vicarage our curriculum is rich and varied, we teach the full National curriculum in key stage 1 and 2, this consists of the core subjects of Maths, English and Information Technology, and the foundation subjects: Science, History, Geography, Art, PE, Music and Design and Technology, Modern Foreign Languages (French & Spanish) Religious Education and Personal, Social and Health Education.
All our pupils are entitled to a wide range of teaching and learning opportunities to help them to achieve the best that they can. We have a learning support team that can provide individual and group support for pupils with a variety of special education needs. We also have a disability scheme, which is reviewed annually, to ensure that we provide all our pupils with equal opportunities to learn and to access all the facilities within the school.
In addition, we teach our pupils to work effectively with a partner to explain and consolidate what they are learning. This provides the teacher with opportunities to assess learning and to pick up on difficulties, such as pupils’ poor articulation, or problems with blending or alphabetic code knowledge. We group pupils homogeneously according to their progress in reading. In Year R we emphasize the alphabetic code. The pupils rapidly learn sounds and the letter or groups of letters they need to represent them. Simple mnemonics help them to grasp this quickly. This is especially useful for pupils at risk of making slower progress. This learning is consolidated daily. Pupils have frequent practice in reading high-frequency words with irregular spellings – common exception words. We make sure that pupils read books that are closely matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and the common exception words.
