This week’s message comes early, and it’s an unusual one because the majority of it is written by Miss Hague, the Head of School at Scholes (Elmet) Primary, one of our sister schools in Sphere Federation:
I’ve visited Moortown Primary School many times to work with Mrs Weekes but a couple of weeks ago I came to talk to the children about safeguarding – making sure we keep our children as safe as they can reasonably be, both in school and beyond school.
From the moment I arrived, I was really impressed by the welcome I received. Simply walking around school, I was met with lots of smiles
and friendly greetings – those first impressions are really important.
During my visit, I met with three different groups of children from three different phases: Years 1 and 2, Years 3 and 4, and children from Years 5 and 6. Our conversation covered many topics such as feeling safe (both in school and online); what you should do if you’re worried about something; behaviour in school; and the school rules. We also talked about what we understand by equality.
The children had a vast amount of knowledge and could talk to me confidently about all these areas.
It was really clear that the Living and Learning curriculum is embedded and woven into many aspects of school life. A real strength for me was to hear the children talk about equality. The younger children were able to talk about everyone being treated the same and the older children were able to talk in more detail about protected characteristics. There was a genuine message (and feeling) that the children were able to convey to me and that was that everyone would be welcome at Moortown Primary no matter what.
When speaking about online safety, our conversation was mostly about keeping personal details safe, not trusting everything people claim to be online, and not getting persuaded by ‘pop-ups’. It’s really helpful if children think in terms of the4Cs for online safety: content (what we see), contact (who we communicate with), conduct (how we behave online), and commerce (buying, selling, gambling, phishing). The NSPCC have useful information that might help you think of the online
risks.
Thanks to the children at Moortown – I had a really lovely afternoon.
And some feedback from someone else, too: we recently had a visit from our Local Authority School Improvement Advisor. Amongst other great feedback were the following comments:
Pupils know the expectations for learning and routines across school are clearly embedded. Teachers were observed demonstrating strong subject knowledge. Behaviour across school continues to be exemplary including during transitional times.