Elfrida Primary School

Our vision and values are at the core of everything we do. They underpin our teaching and learning, and provide an environment which prepares our pupils as confident, happy citizens. We have six core values which underpin everything that we do each day in school. These are

• Resilience
• Responsibility
• Respect
• Community
• Confidence
• Collaboration

Each week children are rewarded with certificates to recognise when staff have seen examples of children demonstrating any of our values in their daily lives.

Elfrida Primary is a two form entry primary school. Due to the high demand for school places across London we are sometimes asked to admit an additional class of Reception children. As such, we currently have 3 classes in Year 2, Year 3 and Year 5.We teach a lively, exciting and fully inclusive, interactive curriculum where we believe in enabling all of our children to enjoy their learning by getting them out of the classroom and into the real world as often as possible.

At Elfrida we continue to work hard to develop a curriculum that is relevant, exciting and interesting to the children who live in Bellingham and the local area.This academic year we are looking to change the curriculum again to ensure that it keeps up with the interests of the children and the changing ways of the world.

We feel it is vital that children are taught the key skills of reading, writing, maths and scientific enquiry, but we also feel that the learning should be irresistible, interesting and enjoyable.

Each year group will complete all of their learning through one topic and this learning will be recorded in their topic books. The topics have been chosen to enthuse the children and the teachers and offer a range of rich learning experiences to support their development into well rounded people who can make a positive impact on our world.

The learning will lead up to one end product. This may be a piece of art, a piece of writing or perhaps a performance. The learning will take place over the course of a whole, or half a term, dependent on the ages of the children.

The teachers will continue to use the National Curriculum to plan from, ensuring that all statutory parts are completed within the year. The children in Nursery and Reception will be taught following the principles of the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework.

At the King Alfred Federation we want all of our pupils to have success for today; be prepared for tomorrow and believe nothing is beyond their reach. The Pupil Premium funding enables us to give extra support in a wide range of ways to overcome barriers that stand in the way of disadvantaged children achieving these aims successfully.

The Pupil Premium is a Government initiative that targets extra money at pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, which research shows underachieve compared to their non disadvantaged peers. The Pupil Premium is provided in order to support these pupils in reaching their potential and overcoming any barriers that stop them achieving. The Government have used pupils entitled to Free School meals, children who have been in care and children whose parents have been in the Services as an indicator for Pupil Premium, and have deployed a fixed amount of money to schools per pupil, based on these criteria. In the King Alfred Federation we will use this money to target these children so that we can ‘narrow the gap’ in regards to attainment.

The Government are not dictating how schools should spend this money, but are clear that schools will need to employ the strategies that they know will support their pupils to increase their attainment, and ‘narrow the gap’. Schools will be accountable for narrowing the gap, and school performance tables now include new measures that show the attainment of pupils who receive the pupil premium compared to their peers.