How We Learn
We believe that the single greatest gift we can give our children is the ability to make choices about their own futures. We want them to be able to make decisions about their futures. We know the best way we can facilitate this is to ensure they have a high quality education.
We expect all our children to leave Bligh Primary School being ‘secondary ready’. This means they are literate and numerate to a high level and able to access a wide range of curriculum content and have cultural capital.
However, we expect much more than this!
We use our school’s pedagogical approach to ensure our children have the widest range of choices as they embark onto the each stage of their education.
Effective learners.
Our staff deploy a 'trinity' of teaching practices (retrieval practice, the gradual release of responsibility and CPA approach) so our children know more, remember more and can do more.
Reading
At Bligh we strive to ensure all the children receive the best possible reading education and are therefore equipped with the skills they need to achieve in all their future endeavours. We aim to foster a love of reading, a curiosity and appreciation of language and the ability to think critically about texts our children read and hear.
There is a growing focus on children's oracy skills and, through their time here, all children will learn to communicate their ideas and emotions with increasing sophistication.
Children develop their reading fluency; younger children will gain sound knowledge of phonics, providing them with a solid foundation for their future learning, and all children will be given the opportunity to read aloud, performing their written work and reciting poems. Throughout their time at Bligh, children will be challenged to read a range of text and genres, which will increase in complexity and level of challenge from across the curriculum.
Finally, it is important to us that all children are told stories and are transported to places that only exist in the world of fiction. Every class at Bligh Primary School has a class reading book and are read to by an adult at least once per day.
A focus on Early Reading.
At Bligh we want all children to become fluent, skilled readers which gives them confidence to access learning and opens up so many opportunities to make positive choices about their future.
In essence we want them to be learning through reading as soon as is possible.
This begins right back in the earliest stages of a child’s education.
Our approach at Bligh is twofold.
1) We ensure all children are taught in a language and print rich environment and develop language through talk, listening to stories and rhymes. This supports the development of language, comprehension and an enjoyment of reading.
2) Children are taught to read by decoding using a synthetic systematic phonics program with direct teaching of word and sentence reading. The books children read are closely matched to the phonics they are learning.
Our whole school approach to phonics is delivered through Essential Letters and Sounds (ELS). Please click here to find more information.
This provides a secure foundation for children to move into Year 2 and the being of our ‘Reading Ready’ strategy.
Reading is all around us at Bligh Primary School.
Positive child characteristics.
We expect Bligh children to show our school values in all that they do. We expect them to be honest, to show empathy, to achieve the best they can, to show resilience and to work as part of a team. It is more than just being able to describe these values. It is about embedding them so firmly in our children that they take these virtues with them into adult life. We believe our values are the building blocks for positive and healthy relationships.
In line with our work with the DfE National Behaviour Hub, we believe in strong routines and we insist our children are 'Ready', 'Respectful' and 'Safe'.
We believe that if we get these parts of our pedagogy right that our children will leave Bligh with the skills they need to make positive life choices. They will simply flourish.
There is a 'trinity' of teaching approaches at Bligh Primary School (retrieval practice, the gradual release of responsibility and from September 2024, concrete/pictorial/abstract learning) that together ensure our children learn and remember more.
Click here to read our whole school Pedagogy Policy.
Click here to read our EYFS Pedagogy.
Click here to view our Curriculum Overviews.