Greenfields Community Primary School

Overview

Greenfields Community Primary strive for ‘excellence by everybody in everything’ as Kent’s lead inclusion school. The school has always had the community at the heart of school life and has continued to do so throughout these challenging times. Since Covid-19, Sport and Wellbeing Development Officer Wendy Ball has ensured all children have had the opportunity to be active both at school and at home.

Keeping Active at School

When lockdown started the school welcomed around 25 keyworker children. Split between key stage 1 and key stage 2, children took part in daily activities including sport and physical activity. Children originally started the day with Joe Wicks but to keep engagement levels up the school introduced Just Dance, yoga and age appropriate HIT workouts. Throughout the day children had the opportunity to take part in boccia, scavenger hunts, The Daily Mile, the blind trail and Charlton Athletic’s Joy of Moving Home School Festival. Now that schools have returned children take part in daily activity within their bubbles including athletics, multi skills, gymnastics and dance. In the last weeks of term Greenfields have been able to run sports days, their annual Sports Personality of the Year awards, National School Sports Week and Kent School Games’ My Active Rainbow Challenge.

Staying Active at Home

To encourage children to stay active at home Greenfields set daily tasks and challenges. Whilst the school found children engaged, they felt parents were inundated with different ideas and didn’t know where to start. Therefore, the school encouraged activities that included whole family engagement including walking, cycling and The Daily Mile which was a huge success.

Family Engagement

Prior to Covid-19 Greenfields has always had high levels of parental engagement in their community clubs including walk and talk, parental netball, football and dance. Since lockdown parents have set up and led their own whole school dance videos and TikTok challenges showing their support for the NHS. However, the school has seen the biggest change in family time, families are walking, cycling, running and dancing together, something Greenfields will continue to build upon in the future.

CPD Opportunities

During this period Mrs Ball has taken this valuable time to work on the school’s inclusion work, attended YST’s virtual inclusion conference and as lead inclusion school, virtually attended SGO meetings. One priority for the school moving forward is the health and wellbeing of their children, staff and community. During this period Mrs Ball has completed HeadStart Kent and the Kent Community Health Trust’s resilience toolkit and received the Kent School Award for Resilience and Emotional Wellbeing.

Learnings

Greenfield will continue to promote the importance of family time, whilst they have high parental engagement Mrs Ball notes that the family aspect can be built upon.

Don’t over complicate things, accept change and be prepared to be flexible.