Aim 1: Enable individual academic success

Teaching and Learning

At Woodlea Primary School, enable individual academic success, developing creative skills through broad learning experiences​, and foster an emotional understanding of ourselves and others​ is at the heart of everything we do to get our children ready for life.

Within the Woodlea family, we give each of our aims equal weighting within a knowledge-rich curriculum, through engaging teaching, within great working relationships. We work hard to ensure that Woodlea Primary is the best possible primary school experience for every child. We also want all children to come to a school like ours, so we look outwards to include other schools in our journey where possible.

Woodlea Wheel

At Woodlea we have adopted the symbol of a wheel to show what we believe is important when approaching learning.

We want all children at Woodlea to be willing and able to:

• Try new things - Success doesn’t just happen. Be optimistic. We all need to go out and find something in which we can experience success. Doing something and continuing to work and develop it brings confidence
• Work hard - If we want to get really good at something there are no shortcuts. Accomplishment is about practice and hard work. Pupils need to understand the benefits of working hard
• Concentrate – if we want to achieve at something we need to concentrate on it and not be distracted. Pupils need to be taught to concentrate
• Push themselves – when pupils don’t feel like doing things, when they feel shy, when they are scared of failure, peer pressure it can be difficult to push oneself but it is essential for success
• Imagine – children have a fantastic imagination which mostly declines with age. George Land in a 1968 study concluded that this non creative behaviour is learned. Decline of imagination is an enemy of success. We need to build and encourage imagination
• Improve – successful people are always trying to make things better. There is always room for improvement. This means lots of tweaking and refinement
• Understand and help others – successful people use what they know to try and be useful to others. It’s not ‘what’s in it for me?’ it is ‘what can I give?’
• Not give up – Bad luck, setbacks, failure, criticism, rejection, hits us all. Successful people find a way around these problems. We need to teach them how to bounce back and be resilient

All these elements underpin everything we do at Woodlea, all day, every day. They apply equally to all members of our school community of learners.