Our Values

At Wallscourt Farm Academy, we create ambitious young people who are culturally aware and who contribute to society and the lives of others as they become adults themselves.  We value tolerance, understanding, mutual respect, unique individuality and celebrate the unity that this makes as we come together as One Learning Community.  We foster a multi-faith, socially diverse environment with an emphasis on common values and principles for life.  These principles underpin everything that happens within and around the school and bind us as diverse individuals within diverse communities that come together with one shared goal – To contribute positively to our own lives and to the lives of others.

We hold high expectations for our learners and have crafted a curriculum that is progressive, well-sequenced, coherent, and inspiring.  We have ambitious aims for the success of our learners and make a commitment to see them flourish and thrive on their journey to reach their full potential.  The curriculum encompasses everything that happens within the Academy, from the skills and attitudes needed to be successful learners, to the knowledge and concepts needed for learners to develop a sense of self, to find their place in the world and unlocking self-agency.

The relationships between the school, the community, our learners and their families are at the heart of our core purpose.  As One Learning Community, we strive to break down the walls and work in collaboration with our learning partners.  It is our aim to welcome the community and families as partners in our aims and vision, and to work together for greater equality and social justice.  We are committed to civil engagement and to giving back to the community that we serve.  Our legacy will live through the lives of every child that has been a member of our learning community and will be seen through the impact that their success has had on their own life and the lives of others.

Our ultimate aim is to secure outstanding outcomes for all learners and to fill their backpacks with the knowledge, tools and ambition to reach their full potential.  The curriculum is enacted across the academy with consistency, likeminded vision and values, and in a way that is joy-filled and inspiring.  We aim for learners to build a breadth of substantive and disciplinary knowledge in progressive and purposeful ways.  The enquiry-led curriculum enables learning to be centred around a key question that provokes, challenges, and inspires curiosity and thought.  It is through this approach to learning that our learners develop into resilient, collaborative, enquiring and independent free thinkers who understand their place in the world and own self-agency.

Our curriculum extends beyond the pages of the written curriculum and out into our real lives; the local and the global.  Our aim is to produce, develop, cultivate and inspire citizens for the future.  We do this by reaching out to our community and working in partnership, not just for the lives of our children and their families but for our wider aims.  To build connections that unit us all; to hold that space, to live in a community where we are all valued, celebrated, and can make a positive impact and contribution to our own life and to the lives of others.

As One Learning Community, we work in collaborative structures with the Cabot Learning Federation and as such our values align with the CLF HEART values and mission.

CLF Mission

To consistently deliver excellent experiences for pupils 3-19, improving their life chances and serving the communities of which we are a member.

CLF HEART Values

Learning is progressive, connected, flexible and personalised

Learning is fun, purposeful and engaging.

Learners achieve their best when motivated and secure

A range of learning environments inspire learning

A caring culture fosters respect and understanding of rights and responsibilities

Effective partnerships with families and community enhance learning

At Wallscourt Farm Academy, we believe that all children have rights, as laid down by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the child. We are fully committed to ensuring that we meet every child’s needs.

We are a completely inclusive school, and we ensure all children are able to access what they need to support them in their learning. You can read over overview of supporting children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. This document is a one page overview for families and our full policy is available in the policy section.

School Charter

We have a School Charter which identifies 3 whole school rights;

1) We have the right to be safe.

We have the responsibility to be kind and caring when we learn and play. Kind hands, kind feet, kind words. We look after our learning environment to keep it safe. We think about our behaviour choices, and they affect other people.

2) We have the right to learn and be the best we can.

We have the responsibility to try our hardest. We value our learning and our learning resources and take pride in everything we do. We use our 21^st Century learning skills to help us – Curiosity and imagination, resilience, independence, and collaboration. to be resilient and to focus on our learning.

3) We have the right to be heard and to tell others what we are thinking and feeling.

We have the responsibility to listen to others.

To promote these values:

As a school, we have a responsibility to promote and support children’s knowledge and understanding of safety and well-being.

Pupil voice and partnership in learning is central to the enriched curriculum we offer at Wallscourt Farm Academy. Our Future Leader Representatives meet regularly to share views, thoughts and ideas in terms of developments at Wallscourt Farm Academy. Self Evaluation from pupils and families is key.

Regular opportunities to gather together as one learning community is an integral part of life at Wallscourt Farm Academy. A values framework underpins these gatherings, and the children are supported to consider a range of key values which support them to become confident citizens who are able to make informed decisions and are balanced in their views, with an understanding and tolerance of the views of others.

Our Behaviour for Learning policy, combined with our whole school Rights and Responsibilities culture underpins the whole language and approach at Wallscourt Farm Academy.

A range of learning experiences and opportunities with the pupils in each year group takes place to help children develop their understanding of ways to keep safe, healthy and happy. This includes visits from members of the community, and the opportunity to meet people from a range of authorities including the Police, Fire services and Ambulance services.

We have close connections with a range of community and faith groups, and the children have the opportunity to learn about and celebrate a range of places and events linked to faith and to life in modern Britain.

SEAL and PSHE learning, Lifelines learning and learning across the school related to Rights Respecting and Restorative Approaches all help promote Safeguarding principles within and beyond the learning zones.

Our Top Ten

When opening a brand new school, we thought carefully about the key aspects which would need to be the core focus of everything we do at Wallscourt Farm Academy. 

Our Top Ten are conceived based on a significant amount of research, reading, thinking, learning and ongoing developments at Wallscourt Farm Academy.

We recently worked with illustrator Laurie Stansfield to create our Top Ten Growth Mindmap, which illustrates all the background research and development which underpins our Top Ten features.

We have created 10 posters, which encapsulate our Top Ten values, and these are shared across the school, as we develop together at One Learning Community. Our Top Ten values are illustrated here and they are used to inform everything we do at Wallscourt Farm Academy.

Technology

Technology can be an extension of the learner, not a tool to get a task completed. Our three learning competencies (the 3 Cs) for learning support children to be communicators, collaborators and creators, and ICT is a superb medium for enhancing this. However it is not the only means for achieving this which is why we will embed technology so that it is the servant and not the master of learning.

Teachers and Teaching Partners are facilitators of learning, engaging in conversations about learning styles, preferences and expectations, with learners becoming as emotionally literate as they are knowledgeable. We want the values and principles of the school to develop positive and active world citizens who can transfer knowledge and skills into the community both locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. We want to help develop people who understand how they learn and why they learn; who understand, appreciate and value difference and have the capacity to adapt and apply quality experiences – at their fingertips.

Conceiving a 21C Building

It is because of the desire to create a new model of learning, that the nature and flexibility of the school building is so essential to the achievement of this vision. We want to blur the artificial boundaries of the classroom, key stages and phases and remove both artificial and structural partitions that often stifle and hinder the true potential of learners (and teachers’) creativity. Our secondary academies (Bristol Brunel and Bristol Metropolitan) have thrived on the use of open plan spaces, break out suites, mentoring and coaching bases and we brought this knowledge to bear on the new building.

We want learning to be experienced inside out, and will be based on the following pedagogical principles:

• Enquiry and question-led learning
• Creativity is a right not a privilege
• Open access anything at any time, both resources, humans and equalities, with the guidance of teachers, such as:Community and local environment
• UWE people, resources and specialized spaces
• Engage with the outdoors and natural environment
• Multi-functional, multi- spatial environments, (‘classrooms’) manipulated by learners for learners.
• Learning styles and needs associated with them

From the start…The following statements are extracts from our original vision for learning, written as part of the initial brief prior to opening:

• Wallscourt Farm Academy will be a blend of the best traditional practices in primary education combined with innovative learning solutions that are proven to work not just in the UK but across the world. The location of the academy close to the heart of a university community, supported by the CLF Teaching School creates an opportunity that will benefit not only the children who attend the school, but also their families and communities.
• At the core of our vision is the goal of developing young people with ambition and aspiration to make a difference to their own lives and others.
• The importance of child-initiated learning will be paramount, and this ethos and approach from the Foundation Years will grow and strengthen as the children grow with the school. Self-esteem and focus on physical and mental well-being is at the heart of the core offer at Wallscourt Farm Academy. The seeds for this approach to learning, growing and developing will be sown collaboratively in the Foundation Years.