Harris Primary Academy Peckham Park

Welcome to Harris Primary Academy Peckham Park where we are proud to celebrate the wide range of backgrounds, abilities, faiths and cultures within our school. Our success lies in our drive to ensure every pupil takes pride in their skills, abilities, and talents and uses these to help them attain the highest possible level of education.

We work together to ensure that our children have a bright, safe, secure and happy place to learn. We celebrate their achievements and encourage mutual respect for one another. We feel that by working together with our children and the wider community we can encourage our pupils to show respect, take responsibility and show resilience as they grow with us.

At Harris Primary Academy Peckham Park we have high aspirations and ambitions for our children and there is a driving determination to ensure that all pupils and adults reach their full potential. Our core purpose is to provide all pupils with high quality learning experiences that lead to high levels of progress and attainment.

Our aims and values underpin all our policy and practice. We consider, revisit and reflect upon these in our day to day work with the pupils and wider community. Through continued and sustained improvement, and a shared understanding of learning, teaching, assessment and curriculum, our Academy aims to:

• Ensure that we inspire in all pupils, a love of learning and the desire to continue to learn
• Ensure that all pupils have an equal opportunity to take part in the life and work of the Academy and the wider community
• Provide a safe, welcoming and stimulating environment where children enjoy learning and playing
• Provide a rich, balanced and varied curriculum
• Provide high standards of teaching to develop knowledge, skills and understanding in all subjects
• Equip all pupils with the learning habits and self-confidence necessary to constructively influence their own lives
• Enable pupils to learn from each other through a collaborative, enquiry based approach to learning
• Promote creativity and independence so that they are more able to explore and discover things for themselves
• Develop learning skills by encouraging a sense of curiosity, open-mindedness, perseverance, objectivity, reflection and critical thinking
• Nurture pupil diversity emphasising individual talents in a wide range of fields, including academic, music, sport, art and drama
• Develop values and opinions within the context of mutual respect and understanding of differing belief systems and cultures within our community
• Be a place that every child remembers with affection

We highly value:

• The way in which all children are unique, and our curriculum promotes respect for the views of each individual, as well as for people of all cultures.
• A working partnership with parents and families to support each pupil’s learning, progress and well-being.
• The spiritual and moral development of each pupil, as well as their intellectual and physical growth.
• The importance of each person in our community. We organise our curriculum so that we promote co-operation and understanding between all members of our community.
• Our environment and we aim, through our curriculum, to teach respect for our world, and how we should care for it.

At Harris Primary Academy, we believe that allowing children to think and work creatively develops self-confidence and builds up key learning skills (e.g. how to manage their own behaviour, their understanding of the learning process, their preferred learning style, to manage information and to learn from others.) Children who think creatively and independently are more likely to discover things for themselves, to be open to new ideas and to be motivated to work beyond lesson time to pursue topics of interest.

We believe these key skills and attitudes are best developed within a motivating cross-curricular thematic approach. Our aim is to create a rich and varied curriculum, meeting national requirements but is uniquely developed by us.