Our school community ethos is based on six core elements: aspiration, curiosity, respect, responsibility, resilience and creativity. Whilst we encourage everyone to show these characteristics all year round, we particularly focus on one each half term through classroom practice and assemblies. Adults are expected to model these attributes at all times and reward children for displaying them.

We want our children to leave Ashby Fields Primary School as well-rounded members of the community with a wide range of knowledge and skills which will equip them for secondary school and the wider world. They should be aspirational and know that success is achieved by making mistakes, learning and moving on. We want all our children to know they belong to our Ashby Fields Family, they are important and their voice matters.

Children

We recognise that happy children are our best learners. Therefore, our timetable is designed to include a variety of elements to support emotional and physical well-being. These include: structure and routine clearly displayed and defined each morning with a widget timetable in the classrooms, peer massage to support transition from lunchtime to learning, meet and greet from Bing (our school nurture dog) and the Headteacher every morning, regular use of the all weather track to support the release of endorphins which gives a positive feeling in the body.

Staff

Like our children, happy staff are better teachers. We have invested in a range of strategies to support our staff’s well-being, these include: a trained mental health first aider available for appointments, SLT open door policy, TA appreciation day, all out teaching staff trained together, an annual car rally and regular free strokes of Bing.

Parents and Carers

We also recognise the essential need to work in close partnership with our parents. It is important for them to feel part of our family and able to communicate with us easily. Our parent package includes; a family support worker, direct email addresses to all staff, regular parent partnership meetings, a text messaging service, termly parents into lessons, four annual twenty minute parent consultations and three written reports, regular parent surveys and Twitter updates to share our learning. All this and much more.

It is important for our happy learners to understand that everyone makes mistakes, it is an integral part of the learning process. Learning from our mistakes is essential to becoming a well-rounded citizen.

Here at school we use a set of principles and practice that encourages children to take responsibility for their behaviour by thinking through the causes and consequences. This is called Restorative Justice.

In a rules-led system, the tendency is for the teacher to tell the child what they’ve done wrong, and how they’re going to pay for it. The problem with this system is that children don’t learn about the responsibility they had in that situation and how it affected other people, because an adult has intervened and told them what they’ve done wrong.’

Restorative Justice, on the other hand, gives the child a voice and allows them to think through their behaviour, its consequences and what they can do to make it better. It helps us to develop, maintain and repair relationships, building a community based around empathy and self-learning, where children take responsibility for their behaviour.

Our staff are trained to ask the following questions when an incident occurs, and the children are encouraged to think carefully about each one: