Ashmole Primary School

We are a forward looking school that is committed to provide the highest standards of educational achievement in an environment rich in its facilities and educational opportunities, where young children are safe, happy and enjoy their time at school with us. We value very much a close partnership with parents and carers and understand how home and working closely with parents and carers can make such a difference to the success and happiness of young children.

Our vision is to provide all pupils with an exceptional primary education, both academically and socially. Our school motto is ‘excellence is a habit’ and we encourage all children to aim high and achieve their personal best in all that they do. The school opened its door to our first Reception cohort in September 2016. The school is a two form entry school with classes from Reception to Year 6; when pupils will carry on into secondary education at Ashmole Academy.

Ashmole Primary School is in a unique geographical location in London having 28 acres of grounds. It proposes to take full advantage of its physical environment by creating an educational campus of outstanding educational establishments within its grounds, all of which are in close proximity to each other. The Academy already is an eight form outstanding 11-16 secondary school with a large and outstanding Sixth Form of 370 students. The main 11-16 school has all purpose built accommodation. The Sixth Form has recently benefitted from a state of the art Sixth Form Centre. The Academy seeks to develop this trend further by providing a private nursery school, funded by the Academy, and a sponsored Free School primary school on its site. It seeks to maximise the educational advantages of all the buildings and the physical environment of the site. It seeks to create the Ashmole Academy Education Campus as a centre of excellence in education from pre-school through to the end of compulsory schooling at the age of 18 with the Academy Trust taking responsibility for ensuring that all such provisions within the campus deliver and continue to deliver an outstanding educational service and performance. It will be an educational campus of an outstanding nature servicing the local community with many of its children, pupils, students and parent/carers living within walking distance of the campus. The campus will have the benefits of the various institutions being within walking distance of each other, enabling the effective provision of resources, school improvement, teacher training and facilities to be maximised.

Ashmole Academy has formed a partnership with Eversley Primary School with its Head Teacher being the primary school lead on the Ashmole project. Eversley School is a large three form entry outstanding primary school. The Ashmole Academy and Eversley Primary School partnership will develop the model for the primary curriculum building upon the successful practices at Eversley and at Ashmole. The primary model will be implemented in a new two form entry feeder primary free school that Ashmole Academy seeks to develop on its site. The Ashmole-Eversley partnership will bring benefit to the partners themselves helping both to develop their school improvement programmes as well as creating a vehicle for innovation and collaboration.

Ashmole Academy seeks to develop a nursery school that, with other local providers, may feed into the Ashmole Primary School. This development is likely to occur after the Free School has started. We consider it important to have an onsite nursery class to establish a strong foundation to the Ashmole experience. As a private setting, the 26 place nursery would also give parents access to wrap around care beyond the core 15 hours of funded early education. In due course we may extend this offer to disadvantaged 2 year olds.

The aims of the nursery class would align with those of the school so that from their earliest days there would be high expectations for children to enable them to achieve highly and develop exemplary standards of behaviour based on mutual respect and creativity. The early year’s curriculum would develop children’s learning holistically by promoting challenging experiences both indoors and outdoors. The nursery class would reap the benefit of using excellent shared school facilities, in particular the extensive grounds, unique in a densely populated London borough. Communication and literacy skills would be strongly developed by introducing signing and encouraging children to articulate their ideas through a variety of media in preparation for a skills-based primary curriculum. Exceptional levels of school readiness would be achieved having followed an enriched, purposeful early year’s curriculum. Each child’s progress would be rigorously tracked by skilful and experienced staff, led by a Qualified Teacher. Staff would benefit from access to exceptional cross phase, professional learning opportunities so common themes and expectations would be established from the outset.