Portico Academy Trust Newsletter
July 2023
Message from the CEO
Dear Parent/Carers,
Welcome to our Portico Academy Trust newsletter for the year September 2022 to July 2023.
It has been a very busy year in all of our schools, across a wide range of activities. Our teaching staff have had the opportunity to meet together, in curriculum subjects, to explore ideas across their area to improve learning and teaching in each school. We also held our 4th annual conference which again explored ideas for improved learning and teaching. These also present opportunities for our teaching staff to meet one another, which occasionally results in teachers moving to teach in one of our other schools, keeping our talented pool of staff within Portico.
All of these activities include Darlinghurst Primary School from the Legra Trust and we all enjoy the opportunity to meet with staff outside our group. Darlinghurst joined us again in our 4th Art and Design Display, which travels between the schools in June and July. I know that many of you have had the opportunity to look at the display and I am sure, like me, you were amazed at the range and quality of the work.
There have been Portico sports festivals this year and we look forward to future joint working.
The central Portico team managing finance, HR and premises has managed to make savings whilst still improving our sites and ensuring that we are fully staffed. Funding has been an issue for us as for all schools in the country, but our efficiencies mean that we can maximise the money that we spend on the children in our schools.
At the end of this school year, we are saying goodbye to Mrs Clark from Hamstel Infant School & Nursery, after 17 years at the helm. We wish her a happy, long and fulfilling retirement. She leaves Hamstel Infants in a strong and vibrant place. Initially Mr Roche will lead the school in a secondment from Friars Primary School & Nursery.
My thanks to the staff and children of Portico Academy Trust for a successful and fun year of learning activities and my gratitude to all our parents and the Trust Board for endless support for everything we do.
I wish you a long, sunny summer.
Yours sincerely
Mrs C Woolf
CEO
Message from Chair of Trust
It has been another successful year for the five schools in our Trust. We have seen charity days, sporting events, musical productions and various interesting and fun celebrations for the King's Coronation. There have been numerous educational visits for our children to enjoy new experiences that enhance their learning and many of our school sites have seen improvements this year to the playgrounds and outdoor learning spaces including a new sand pit and a long jump pit which I'm reliably informed are two very different things serving two very different purposes.
I am sure you will join me in thanking all the hardworking teachers, learning assistants and support staff that give our children the very best opportunities to achieve their potential. Special thanks go to Lisa Clark as she embarks on her retirement after 17 years as Headteacher at Hamstel Infant School and Nursery. She leaves a great legacy at the school and we send her our very best wishes.
Finally, thanks go to you, our amazing parents, grandparents, carers and wider family for all the support you give to the schools throughout the year. We hope you have enjoyed seeing the incredible work your children have produced as well as enjoyed the many presentations that have been put on for you.
I hope you all have a lovely summer.
Karen Packer
Our Vision
As primary specialists, Portico Academy Trust firmly believes that all our children, no matter their background, deserve the very best education, every day, every lesson, whatever the context. Through close professional collaboration and sharing best practice, initiatives and expertise, we want every child to experience a breadth of opportunity across the diverse cultural background of our country.
We will develop strong leaders and make our schools supportive communities for staff and parents, where mutual respect is paramount. We are passionate in protecting our environment and encourage positive views and actions in the wider world.
We believe it is vital that each child acquires the essential key skills they will need to secure the fundamental building blocks of learning. In creating an exciting curriculum, expertly delivered, our children will leave us well prepared for their future lives with a love of learning and with an enthusiastic, independent, inquisitive and risk taking mind-set.
Our Values
- We want the best learning experience for every child, every day.
- We recognise that learning is the key to every child’s future.
- We meet challenges head on and find creative solutions.
- We treat all members of our school community and our environment with respect.
Our Aims
- To create a family of outstanding schools with clear purpose, direction and objectives
- To provide environments where teaching and learning is paramount and children enjoy and are engaged in a rich and relevant curriculum tailored to their individual needs
- To narrow gaps in attainment with the intention of reducing inequalities
- To ensure empowerment of all pupils to achieve their full potential
- To create and foster a culture of high aspiration amongst all pupils, regardless of their social, economic or cultural background
- To strive for excellence in teaching and learning
- To ensure strong engagement in learning that fosters a lifelong learning ethos
- To promote excellent progress for all learners.
- To promote outstanding leadership and governance.
- To establish a financial foundation to enable the Trust to fulfil its vision
- To provide continual professional development and promote a well-resourced, high quality environment
- To become the employer of choice
- For each academy to be recognised as a centre of learning excellence, disseminating best practice within and beyond the Trust
- To engage proactively with parents and the community in partnership to support pupil progress, wellbeing and achievement
Friars Primary School and Nursery
Another strong year at Friars comes to a close; one where we saw many successes. Our strong and stable school continues to flourish thanks to our children, staff, parents and families.
At the heart of what we do is our curriculum which continues to develop to give the best opportunities possible for the children we serve. We work collaboratively as a Friars team to reflect upon and adapt the curriculum each year and this work is supported by the professional networks we have with colleagues from the other Portico schools. Our Portico subject leader meetings prove very useful to this. There has been a great deal of pupil excitement around the different topics we have taught in 2022-23 and around the many curriculum enhancements we delivered. This included things such as outdoor learning, hook days, educational visits and visitors, participation in Southend competitions and a variety of school events. We are pleased that this year we received the NCCE Computing Quality Mark, serving as recognition of the excellent computing education provision at our school.
A significant curriculum change this academic year was the introduction of the Little Wandle Phonics scheme. This has had a positive impact and a successful peer review with Hamstel Infants helped confirm that our practices were highly effective. We have held two highly successful parent training sessions relating to phonics.
At the end of 2021-22 we began our journey with OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) but it is now in full swing. We have our first sandpit (in a repurposed gazebo), two large loose parts areas, a mud kitchen, new construction area, dressing up, music listening zones, a ‘wheeled’ area and a not so small… ‘small world’. We are regularly receiving donations of games, toys and various bits and pieces from our school community for our children to be creative. In the summer term we hosted our first playday events for parents and carers to spend time playing with their children in our OPAL provision.
This year we have taken great efforts to further improve our school environment. There have been many works inside and outside of our building to make it even better for our children. These works have included development of both the Year 1 garden and the KS1 Library courtyard, a new sensory room, and the overhaul of the Quad. The Quad is a garden that sits inside our building and moving forward it will be a quiet space for children to read and take lunch.
Next year watch out for more exciting changes… Over the summer we are creating a new bistro to not only better support the cooking we do as part of our DT curriculum but to also provide a better home for our Lunchtime and Extended Schools Clubs. We are also changing the purposes of two of our smaller rooms to make them into new learning spaces.
Goodbye 2022-23, see you soon 2023-24!
Hamstel Infants School & Nursery
At Hamstel Infant School and Nursery, our motto is, ‘We Care’. We are committed to providing for our children to develop and have fun learning in an inclusive and nurturing environment, one where everyone is valued. We work hard to ensure this is a ‘lived’ experience for everyone within our school community – our children, staff teams, and parents – every day. We provide wide ranging opportunities for children to reach their full potential within a welcoming, caring, safe, happy and supportive school. We have had many trips to the beach and the local library for all year groups and this year we have forged new links with the Hive at Garon Park.
Reading for pleasure is embedded and a new story time area has been created for all to access and use. Mastery in Number has been introduced with the use of STEM sentences to support learning; not only in maths but now throughout all subjects due to its impact. Our end of year assessments have been very respectable again this year - Reception Good Level of Development 63.9% (not SEND 78.7%), Phonics Screening Test 89.9% (not SEND 95.6%), KS1 combined score for Reading, Writing and Maths was 50.3% (not SEND 62.3%).
Our sporting prowess knows no bounds: we came second on the Southend City Sports, are in the finals for the County 3 Tees Cricket event, have taken part in Cross Country, Tag Rugby, Football, Speed Stacking, Mini Games, Panathlon events etc..; our children are great ambassadors in representing our school.
Children’s health and wellbeing is crucial to children’s learning and is a moral priority for us all. We focus on transition to support all learners joining and leaving us. The staff go above and beyond with home visits for Nursery and Reception children and all 26 pre-schools are visited to gain vital information before the children start with us. All Reception children are screened using a DfE approved system for identification of language acquisition which informs interventions at a very early age.
We support many charities and national events throughout the year, both locally and at a national level. The Singing Club took part in the Music Festival and sang at local homes for the elderly at Christmas.
Hamstel Juniors School
Hamstel Junior School has had a very successful school year. The school has continued its journey of continuous improvement and high expectations in all areas of school life. After our success in the Year 4 multiplication tables check and end of key stage 2 SATs we want to build on these successes.
The English leads, and core leadership were part of a deep dive into reading with West Leigh Junior School where both schools learnt more about how reading was taught in their respective schools. As a team we learnt much from this process and have taken actions for next year from these visits.
Each year group had access to a VR headset experience, linked to their theme, and there were an increased number of visitors and workshops. All year groups produced a staged production and we returned to class assemblies where parents were invited. We held charity days and celebrated the King’s Coronation. We proudly produced our elephant sculpture for the ‘Herd about the City’ project which is displayed in the city throughout the summer, and we were asked to produce eco-themed display boards for The Royals Shopping Centre which our eco warriors played a big part in promoting. This aspect of pupil voice was something we wanted to strengthen.
We entered many sporting events and came third in both the swimming gala and Borough Sports for our group; we had an increased number of children invited to this year’s Super Sports competitions.
We also raised the profile of our school choir with more children involved than ever before. We sang in assemblies and also in the infant school, at the local old people’s residence, a local garden centre, the annual SEESMA concert and the Southend Choirs event with a piece of music composed by our children.
Porters Grange Primary School
Porters has once again welcomed a record number of pupils through ‘in year admissions’, successfully settling, inducting and quickly supporting 115 new pupils across the year.
Lunchtimes continue to be enjoyed by all our children through our highly successful outdoor play and learning (OPAL) provision. This is enabling all our children, whatever their need, to play, explore and build on their social skills. We plan to expand the provision further into next year.
Our bespoke phonics programme is now well embedded and our children in Reception and Year 1 are achieving extremely well. The Phonics Screening check results are the highest we have ever seen at 83.6 %, despite a high level of SEND, English as an additional language and mobility in this year group.
A love of reading has been carefully promoted and prioritised by all staff and expertly lead by our reading leader. Our children have protected time for this each week and also have ten minutes at the end of each day when the class teacher reads aloud from a class book.
‘Aspiration’ has been our important curriculum driver this year. As part of this drive to increase the aspirations of our children, we held a very successful careers week where speakers from a range of professions were invited to speak about what they do, the skills needed and qualifications required. The children were very engaged in the range of speakers and asked some perceptive questions.
Our bespoke curriculum continues to be embedded and our learning sequence is proving to be highly effective in developing children’s skills and knowledge. Our children have recently proved that they are able to talk like artists and designers, demonstrating a deep knowledge of a variety of aspects art and design technology.
West Leigh
It has been a wonderfully successful year for the children of West Leigh Junior School. They have worked very hard throughout the year and consequently achieved well in the national Year 4 Multiplication Test and in the end of KS2 (Year 6) SATS.
We are very proud of their academic achievements, including a mathematics quiz team from Year 6 who travelled to the final in Oxford. They came 25th out of a possible 17,000 primary schools.
We participated in many sporting events, field elite teams and participatory teams. The year concluded with West Leigh Junior School winning the Southend Sports School of the Year.
Through our school council the children celebrated individual citizenship awards and organised a variety of charitable collections. We sent some of our eco warriors to participate in a Southend project alongside other schools in the city.
Our school council has been instrumental in designing our playground changes, which has resulted in more interesting and varied play opportunities. We listened to the experiences of our partner schools as they have already participated in the OPAL project and have learnt from some of their ideas.
The boys’ and girls’ choirs performed at a variety of venues, including O2 and Royal Festival Hall. Music remains a very important aspect of school life at West Leigh.
Years 3, 5 and 6 have had the opportunity to go on residential trips to Danbury for one night, Danbury for two nights and Ilam Hall in the Derbyshire Peak District for four nights respectively. Year 4 have been on a number of trips to the beach for their Coastal Schools learning and our outdoor learning experience was expanded this year to include activities in the woods.
The children entered work into the Leigh Art Trail and we welcomed the Portico Academy Trust Art & Design Exhibition to the school in time for an Open Evening at the end of July.
We look forward to another full year beginning in September 2023.
OPAL
We now have three of our five schools on the OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) journey with Friars being the most recent school to join the scheme.
Our lunchtimes and playtimes are being transformed with a wide range of play stations and equipment including sandpits, building blocks, table tennis, small world and much more.
Some of the most significant changes we have noticed include:
- high levels of engagement and wellbeing
- great excitement about playtime and lunchtime
- confidence and responsibility in tidying up and setting up resources
- pleasure in accessing more areas and mixing across ages.
- the changing role of adults from supervisors to partners in play
- reduced accidents and behaviour incidents
Portico Art & DT Festival
For the last three weeks of the summer term, our Portico Art and Design Festival travelled between our Portico schools. We were joined again this year by Darlinghurst. Each school carefully displayed its work on stands, which were then transported by minibus between the different locations. This year we felt the quality of the displays was of a particularly high standard with year groups from all of our schools showcasing the journey towards creating a high-quality finished product. Children from all our schools visited the exhibition and were able to learn from the practice of their peers in other schools. Many parents were also able to visit the festival and commented on the variety of work across the trust.
Portico Football Festival
In the spring term Hamstel Junior School hosted a Portico Football Festival for the Year 5 & 6 boys' football teams. Despite some of the children having never played as a team before, they showed tremendous teamwork and enthusiasm in all their matches. It was lovely to see the children congratulating and encouraging the other teams from our trust.
Super Sports - Portico Podium
There were a great number of sporting achievements across the trust this year at Borough Sports with a record number of children getting through to the Super Sports.
This year, for the first time, we had a Portico Podium with first, second and third place for the Year 3 Girls' 400 metre race all going to runners from our Portico Schools. Well done, girls!
Herd in the City
Three of our schools created their very own elephants as part of the Havens Hospice Herd in the City trail. Between 14th July and 4th September, forty-five dazzlingly decorated large elephant sculptures and more than 70 baby elephants are being displayed across Southend-on-Sea creating a spectacular event for everyone to enjoy. Donations made throughout the trail will help Havens Hospice provide specialist care and support for local people of all ages who are living with incurable conditions.
Friars Primary School - Literature-ly Marvel-lous
Friars Primary School and Nursery believe in the importance of reading, and their marvelous elephant reflects this. ‘Reading is good for you; it improves your focus, memory, empathy and communication skills. It can reduce stress and improve wellbeing, all of which are important at Friars. What a SUPER design on to reflect that reading is for super awesome people.’
Hamstel Infants School - HamsAnimal
Hamstel Infant School & Nursery's elephant design incorporates the animals and shapes from each of their class names to represent all the children and staff. Their elephant was hand painted by a collection of some of their shining artists.
Hamstel Junior School - Hamstel City Elephant
Hamstel Junior School's elephant is a colourful montage of everything we love about our city - from the wonderful seafront, flowers in our parks and Adventure Island to our history, culture and schools.
Community Links
Friars - Working with our local community is key for us at Friars and over the course of the academic year events have included our choir singing at the Salvation Army toy service, various visitors to the school from our local churches and a visit to the Hive Nature School at Garons Park. Our Year Two children were lucky enough to have a visit from some elderly people from our local community who shared stories of their childhoods and how life has changed over the years. We have a strong local connection with Trust Links which is situated close to the school grounds. We often advertise their events in our school newsletter and help where we can. In PE, following on from the success of the Lionesses, we made a pledge to 'grow girls football' at Friars and have worked closely with Soccer 66 who offer ‘girls only’ football sessions locally. Many of our girls attend their weekly sessions and in the summer term we arranged a friendly match between Soccer 66 and Friars. Our karate coach runs his lessons from Friars and has a lot of Friars’ pupils in his club.
Hamstel Infant School - We identify interventions that are available and support families to access these. These include Early Help, Health 4 Life, parenting, food vouchers, school uniform, emotional wellbeing and mental health services, the school nursing team, adult education, volunteering to support employment, Dove, Fledglings, National Centre for Domestic Abuse, NSPCC, Samaritans, Therapy for You, holiday clubs, the Community Fridge project, play therapy and Christmas presents - this is not an exhaustive list! We are always looking for new interventions that will support our families.
Our inclusion manager has worked with charities and the Scouts to identify families that were unable to purchase Christmas presents. Each family received presents for the adults and children. She delivered “Christmas in a Hamper”. This contained everything a family needs to make a Christmas dinner including Christmas crackers and a gift for each of the children. This initiative was supported by Southend Fit and Fed.
This year we have forged a new working relationship with Packed with Smiles and have received funding of £3000 to obtain new uniform for identified families. We have supported 23 children with brand new uniform so far this year.
At Christmas the children in our Singing Club went Carol Singing at local Homes for the Elderly.
Hamstel Junior School is proud to sit at the heart of its local community. This year, led by our school eco-warriors, the children have designed four environmentally-themed art boards to display in the Victoria Shopping Centre. Our Glee club also performed at Whittingham House Residential Home and Scotts Garden Centre. Local businesses have continued to support the school through their kind donations to the Hamstel Schools' summer raffle and by providing refreshments at sports day.
The school has raised money for a number of charities including Children in Need and Save the Children. As part of our celebration of harvest, the school collected donations for the local foodbank.
Porters Grange - Over the course of the year our children raised money for a series of different charities, from Children in Need and Save the Children in the autumn term to Comic Relief in the spring. In addition, the children linked up with the Southend Foodbank to provide 308 meals through our Harvest Festival donations.
Throughout the course of the year our choir has performed multiple times at the Cliffs Pavilion and at the Palace Theatre. Our KS1 choir has made music at the King’s Road Unitarian Church alongside others in the spring. Over the Christmas period we linked with our local church of All Saints to perform a carol service and nativity play. They also welcomed us for Christingle services which the children thoroughly enjoyed.
We have also been fortunate enough to welcome the Southend Diving team to talent spot at our school. Through this, twelve of our children in Years 2 and 3 have been identified as having the potential to take part in a diving team. We have also further developed our links with Southend United FC. The children had the opportunity in the summer term to learn football skills and sportsmanship from their coaches at lunchtime. Their outreach team also worked with our Year 5s on healthy living and lifestyles.
West Leigh Junior - The school has always maintained effective links with the local community and this year, we have strengthened these connections further. As part of our ongoing charity work, we have raised money for a wide range of charities, including Macmillan, Children in Need and Comic Relief. We co-ordinated a food collection at Christmas, providing a wealth of donations for Southend Foodbank’s Christmas Appeal and more recently, led by our school council, raised over £1000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Throughout the year, our choirs have performed at a variety of venues including the Palace Theatre, the O2 and the Salvation Army where they accompanied The Music Man Project. The Southend Brass group also made an appearance during a special assembly at Christmas.
From an environmental angle, there have been numerous opportunities to work with the community, led by our eco warriors. Through our involvement with the SSP Eco Squad, a litter pick was arranged in Belfairs Woods and at the beach at Bell Wharf. This endeavour involved the majority of the school clearing up our local area. Two representatives also took part in an event at The Hub at Garon Park where they worked collaboratively with other squad members from different schools. The eco warriors also worked with The Essex Wildlife Trust to consider how we as a community can become more sustainable and how our actions can negatively affect our environment.
Road safety also enabled us to work with various members of the community including the Walk It road safety scheme in Year 5 and Bikeability in Year 6.
Road safety has also enabled us to work with various members of the community including the Walk It road safety scheme in Year 5 and Bikeability in Year 6.
Doing our bit for Charity
Over the course of the academic year, we held non-uniform days, Christmas jumper days and other fundraising events to raise money for important causes.