Staff respond very positively about the strategic benefits of reorganising the historic four house system and the potential for the wider impact this decision can have - see below for some of the implementation and impact of the new structure.

Community Wellbeing

A Mud bathing relaxed hippo!

Attitude to Learning

A charging rhino!

Powerful Knowledge

An Elephant never forgets!

Each week, every class names a House Hero who is shared at the House assembly.

The House assemblies are also a great opportunity to share learning and reflect on how we can all get better!

When children join in Year 3, they not only become part of a class, but also a House. The Year 5 children of the House act as their class buddies AND, within the classes, individual and group buddies are set up to allow children t build stringer relationships and have a role model in the upper school. these relationships continue into Year 6 and 4 with the younger children mentored by the older children. In Year 5, the children then become the mentors.

House activities include sharing work with each other (writing for a purpose say) Supporting reading: hearing younger children read and asking them authorial intent questions. And wellbeing conversations - How are you? Allowing the children to have an elder child they can talk to.

In the picture above, the House Assembly Year 5 children supported Year 3 children with developing sketching skills:

Year 5 and Year 3 love spending tie together in our Buddy Assemblies. Recently, the Year 5 children have taken the lead and organised some activities for Year 3 with the aim of teaching them some skills that we have.

The first activities to be organised by Year 5 were drawing and sketching. It is so wonderful to see the children from different year groups working together and learning from each other. There are certainly some budding teachers and artists in our midst!

Research suggests that in teaching the concept, the children are forced to articulate the ideas more clearly repeating the learning and impacting on their longer term memory development of the skill.

All children are awarded raffle tickets for personal acts of impressive progress. These raffle tickets go into a draw each term and the winners receive £25 Amazon vouchers (as voted for by the Student Parliament and children.)

The Raffle Tickets also act as our House Points throughout the year with other events such as sports day also building on friendly, fair competition. We celebrate competition and encourage success!

House Buddies regularly enjoy reading for pleasure together. Older children are supported t ask open questions to further explore the text and engage their buddy.

As a school, we prioritise supporting readers to read for pleasure building on an amazing reading spine of quality texts and a range of class, group and individual extra support. There really is a genre out there for everyone!

All of the children received a mini 4-in-a-row game in Christmas 2020 and were then able to play in a whole school (all staff and students) completion. Congratulations to Mr Neighbor, the eventual winner!

We are able to use the House Structure to support our transition planning and day. With stable staffing, we often maintain consistent House membership for staff which adds a little more friendly competition and opportunities for developing effective working relationships and Teams - see below:

Our House system also allows us to organise staff learning teams by House ensuring every year group is represented for these targeted subject leader team meetings. Covid has limited this more recently but, as of today 8.2.22, we are hopeful that isolation and covid restrictions, may be coming to an end!