As your child enters our nursery, we begin with a Foundation Baseline assessment. This initial evaluation helps us understand where your child stands in various developmental areas. It allows us to identify strengths and areas for growth, enabling us to tailor activities that will engage and challenge them from day one.
To keep you connected, we use Tapestry, an online platform that allows parents to follow their child’s daily activities and learning experiences. Through photos, observations, and notes, you’ll be able to see how your child interacts with their peers and engages with the curriculum. This transparency helps foster a strong partnership between home and school, enabling you to support your child’s learning journey.
Play-based learning in the Early Years is integral in supporting each child’s individual learning style and pace. Through highly thought-out activities, your child has the opportunity to explore their learning through their play in a way that is uniquely tailored to their interests and strengths. Whether role playing, retelling stories or creating with materials, all of these help children to experiment with language, letters and words.
In doing so, this creates a space for your child to naturally develop language, literacy and communication skills in an engaging way that fosters curiosity for reading and writing. By following your child’s lead, play-based learning nurtures early literacy in a way that feels individualised and natural, helping your child build their confidence and allowing them to progress at their own pace as early readers and writers.
We recognise that every child’s learning journey is unique and that some children develop at different times as they transition through their school years. Through careful observation, termly assessment and individualised tracking of your child’s progress, we can quickly highlight any anomalies as they occur.
To assist in this process, our dedicated Head of Learning Support for the younger years runs 1:1 or small group sessions for those identified who might need just a little extra touch of support in areas such as maths or reading. Our aim is for every child to have a rock-solid foundation on which to build.
As your child progresses to Year 3, they will benefit from working in small carefully chosen tutor groups for maths and English with their own specialist teacher. This structure ensures that teaching is tailored to your child’s specific learning profile. Children are grouped based on their current skills and understanding, allowing them to receive targeted support and challenge.
All year group teachers are involved in a regular review of each child’s progress and evaluation of any changing need as your child develops. This approach helps to build confidence and competence, enabling all children to thrive. Every person at every level at Prospect House is responsible for strong progress in maths and English.
Understanding that literacy is foundational to all learning, this targeted group focuses on enhancing reading skills in order to foster a love for reading while ensuring that every child becomes a confident and fluent reader. Having access to high-quality texts is what underpins our daily teaching, which can then build on the strong foundations established through these chosen pieces.
We use the Write Stuff approach which combines the principles of high-quality vocabulary and prose with the science of cognitive load and dual coding to create an immersive experience for the children where their ideas are both supported and structured but also allowed to fly.
Children are encouraged to take risks in their vocabulary and within lessons –– the classrooms come alive with the sound of amazing words and ideas whizzing around! As nurturing the creativity of our young minds is at the forefront of all of our lessons, we prioritise the ambitious vocabulary and modelling that will inspire our children to take their own path, while simultaneously feeling supported and guided in their journeys by their teachers.
For our more able students, we offer a Gifted and Talented pathway in art, sport, and music from Year 3 onwards. Meeting once a week, these sessions provide opportunities for deeper exploration and enrichment in these areas, with dedicated scholarship groups to further extend identified pupils from Year 5.
Alongside theory, vocal and other instrumental sessions, musically gifted children are typically chosen to play chamber music on a regular basis, the musical benefits always proving significant. Members of a recent Year 6 brass trio, for example, were all awarded music scholarships to secondary schools.
Our sport scholarship students follow a pathway that enhances over and above what they receive in class. These sessions mirror the secondary school scholarship day events. The children are also selected for tournaments giving them the opportunity to compete against other talented children.
Our selected artists’ pathway enables children to develop their sketchbook and research work through the implementation of a ‘coursework’ style approach. Carefully selected themes enable our children to take their art in a direction of their choosing, culminating in our end of term art exhibition showcase; here, pupils display and discuss their idea development, process and work to a wider audience.
Children who are identified as particularly able in maths and English are also selected and encouraged to participate in extension challenges and activities both internally and in the wider community. Maths challenges attended over recent years have included those organised by King’s College Wimbledon, Emanuel School and Epsom College. Within English, children are encouraged to take part in opportunities, such as the Poetry Together programme, our house writing competition and the Dukes Spelling Bee.
As partners in your child’s education, your involvement is invaluable. To this end, we offer an ‘open door’ policy where parents are actively encouraged to come to meet with the head or their child’s teachers. From the start of their school journey, you can engage with Tapestry to celebrate your child’s achievements, discuss your day-to-day experiences and communicate with teachers about your child’s progress and any concerns you might have.
When it comes to the transition on to the next stage of your child’s education, we work together with parents to support, inform and guide you to make the best choice for your child’s next school placement. By working together, we can ensure that your child’s individualised learning journey is both successful and fulfilling.
