We believe that all children can achieve excellence and that a quality primary education provides the platform for lifelong success. We pride ourselves on developing curious learners, who engage readily with their learning, consistently demonstrate our values and want to do their very best with every opportunity. Excellent practices and systems in our school, support all children to be successful and confident.
At West Hill we offer a broad, creative and diverse curriculum which drives curiosity for knowledge, and which reflects the society we live in.
At West Hill we:
We teach the foundation subjects (Art, DT, Music, Geography, History, PSHE, RE, P.E and Computing) discretely.
We want pupils to understand and appreciate the uniqueness of each discipline; to leave primary school understanding what each subject is. We want to promote a love and intrigue of each subject and do each one justice.
Where possible, we make connections with the wider curriculum as we recognise that it is crucially important for children to learn skills and make links between their learning.
At West Hill we recognise the importance of all subjects across the National Curriculum. We foster strong links with Wandsworth creative arts team, the Wandsworth Music service, and Wandsworth Sports services.
We provide pupils with a curriculum, which celebrates all areas of learning.
Nurture at West Hill involves listening carefully to pupils and responding appropriately, focusing on building self-esteem and confidence so that all children feel valued, respected and belong to the school community.
Pupil well-being is at the forefront of our ethos. Our school motto: ‘Ready to learn, inspired to succeed, prepared for life’ encapsulates this.
Our weekly assemblies recognise that development of a child’s personal and social qualities are equally important to ensure that pupils leave our school with the skills of empathy, compassion, resilience, honesty and respect.
We enrich learning and aim to inspire children to want to find out more by planning school trips, visitors and workshops. These trips and visits help build meaningful connections across the curriculum and set the children’s learning into real life contexts, helping them to make sense of it. Home learning projects and homework tasks also enhance our topic outcomes and achievements; children go home inspired by their learning, wanting to delve
deeper and find out/do more!
The early skills of reading and writing are the vital building blocks for all learning. At West Hill we follow the Read Write Inc phonics approach in Early Years and Foundation stage and Key Stage 1.
At the end of year 2 and in ks2, we follow a whole school reading approach in order to deepen pupil’s understanding of a rich, diverse range of genre and authors with the intent of fostering a love of reading.
We recognise that pupils at West Hill need a variety of language development opportunities. It is vital to develop their vocabulary to ensure that they make good progress in their writing skills.
Our approach to a language rich curriculum is also central to our Mathematics curriculum. We follow the White Rose Maths Mastery curriculum from Nursery through to Year 6. This ensures that all of our pupils develop a deep understanding of number and mathematical concepts and work towards true ‘mastery’ of number.
