Personal Development

At Ark Blacklands, we are committed to providing a broad and balanced life-skills curriculum through PSHE education. This is taught through the three strands of Relationships and Sex Education, Health Education and Living in the Wider World. Our PSHE curriculum is essential to providing pupils with the knowledge, skills and attributes needed to manage their lives now, and in the future. Through quality delivery, it aims to develop:

• Confident individuals who know and understand how to live safe, happy, healthy and fulfilling lives
• Young people who are able to maintain positive, respectful and healthy relationships, within which they can thrive personally and socially
• Responsible citizens who understand they have rights and responsibilities that help them to make a positive contribution to society
• Successful learners who enjoy discovering new knowledge, making progress and achieving success

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What is Cultural Capital?

Cultural capital is the accumulation of knowledge, behaviours, and skills that a pupil can draw upon and which demonstrates their cultural awareness, knowledge and competence; it is one of the key ingredients a pupil will draw upon to be successful in society, their career and the world of work.

• Cultural capital promotes social mobility and success in our stratified society.
• Cultural capital gives a pupil power. It helps them achieve goals, become successful, and rise up the social ladder without necessarily having wealth or financial capital.
• Cultural capital is having assets that give pupils the desire to aspire and achieve social mobility whatever their starting point.

Each subject taught within the school day makes its own contribution to pupils’ cultural capital development. Our curriculum aims to combine knowledge with experience and judgement on what pupils see. The three elements that the Oxford Dictionary uses to define wisdom. Pupils participate in a wealth of trips, visits and experiences, supported by a wide range of extra-curricular clubs.

We recognise that for pupils to aspire and be successful academically and in the wider areas of their lives, they need to be given rich and sustained opportunities to develop their cultural capital.

How do we promote Cultural Capital for Our Pupils?

At Ark Blacklands we ensure that every child has the chance to access a wealth of experiences, through a variety of ways. We endeavour to ensure that all pupils from Reception up to Year 6 have the opportunity to make termly visits to the surrounding community and beyond. We take advantage of our prime position on the South Coast and enable our children to experience all that it has to offer in terms of its social, historical and geographical content. We plan for our lessons and extra-curricular activities to be broad and enriching.

We believe that learning from first-hand experience is very powerful and provides lasting impact with the philosophy: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand".

All enrichment activities link to children’s learning that term. For example, children have visited the Hastings Castle as a part of the history focus on uncovering the past. Children studying animal habitats have visited Drusilla’s Park, looking at where animals live. Children have taken part in a dance festivals with the local secondary school to showcase their talents. Children have performed Christmas songs for the community in the town's local theatre and at local care homes.

We invite experts into our school to work with our children, including novelists, dramatists, artists, musicians, historians and representatives from local services. Experts inspire our children to learn through sharing their passion for their subject area, which can raise our children’s aspirations for their future career

In addition to this, we organise special events, curriculum days, and family events to enrich our pupils’ lives and challenge them to aspire to be people who leave a mark on the world.

Primary Connections Passports

At Ark Blacklands we are committed to ensuring all pupils leave us in Year 6 having experienced an enriched primary school experience. To help achieve this, in September 2021 we introduces the Primary Connections Passport.

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Everyone at Ark Blacklands works consciously and conscientiously to make it a place where children acquire the character virtues that lead to success in school and university, in work and life beyond. Essential to this is our understanding of what constitutes Character Development .

Character Development can be defined as the active development of character strengths or virtues in young people. The practice of Character Development is based on the view that these strengths are not merely given but can be developed through instruction and practice.

Our work in this area is premised upon two ideas. First, that character is both ‘taught’ and ‘caught’. Taught because pupils need to learn directly about character strengths and virtues, and to be given opportunities to practise them. Caught because pupils need to be exposed to the concepts and language of character throughout their experience of school. This is best delivered through the ethos of the school, by teachers and other adults in school acting as role models, by empowering children to be role models and recognising them publicly as such, and by engineering enrichment activity so that it emphasises character development.

The second idea is that there are four core dimensions to character: intellectual, performance, moral and civic. These are demonstrated in the table below. Successful Character Development seeks to develop pupils along all four dimensions.

Our chosen values, known as the 'Habits of Success' guide the culture and ethos of our Academy to ensure that we are able to realise our mission. They are a central part of the life of the Academy and should be evident in every aspect of Academy life. Our habits of success are:

Our curriculum is infused with opportunities for children to develop their character strengths and virtues. These are complimented by weekly assembly which link explicitly to our Habits of Success, British Values and SMSC. Together, discrete and embedded learning gives the children the knowledge, language and moral exemplars to help them continue strengthening the virtues in their own lives.

Further to this, we have the Connections Passport, a set of enriched experiences that we believe to be character building in the truest sense. These experiences are embedded in our curriculum as authentic outcomes to learning.

At Blacklands, we know that financial awareness is vital to children’s development. We are committed to teaching financial awareness alongside our Mathematics and Personal, Social and Health Education. All children will have discreetly taught sessions about Money from EYFS and throughout KS1 and KS2. Sometimes these sessions will be blocked together in a more in-depth study as part of our Personal Development curriculum.

We aim to give children the confidence, skills and knowledge they need to manage their money, now and in the future. We aim to teach financial education with a child-centred approach both in the classroom and at home.

An overview of our finance curriculum objectives, which are supported with resources from the HSBC Money Heroes project

At Ark Blacklands, British values are promoted in much of what we do throughout the school year, including our:

• School collective worship
• Through planned activity days
• Through sessions in targeted and age appropriate curriculum topics
• Religious Education & PSHE
• Our clubs and extra-curricular activities
• The work of pupil council and other pupil-led activities
• Our generally positive and inclusive ethos

As well as actively promoting British values, the opposite also applies: we would actively challenge pupils, staff or parents expressing opinions contrary to fundamental British values, including ‘extremist’ views.

The term ‘British values’ might be slightly misleading in that these values are integral to so many countries throughout the world – they differ in no way from the values of most western European countries.

Being part of Hastings, East Sussex and Britain and playing our part in the Global Community

As a school, we value and celebrate the diverse heritages of everybody at Ark Blacklands. Alongside this, we value and celebrate being part of our local community and Britain. In general terms, this means that we celebrate traditions, such as customs in the course of the year; for example, the Harvest festival during the Autumn term, maypole dancing for May Day and various cultural days where we learn about the traditions of different cultures in our community.

We also value and celebrate national events, Remembrance Day, National Others Week. We work with our local PCC and have links to our local church, Christ Church, Blacklands.

Furthermore, children learn about being part of Britain from different specific perspectives within their curriculum topics, for example:

• Geography: where we ensure that children have a better understanding of what Britain is, learning more about its capital cities and counties, its rivers and mountains, where Britain is in relation to the rest of Europe and other countries in the world.
• History: Britain and its influence in modern times is woven into our thematic topics
• Music: study of British composers and their influence worldwide
• Art: study of how British artists influence others. 

Democracy

Children, parents and staff have many opportunities for their voices to be heard at Ark Blacklands. Democracy is central to how we operate.

An obvious example is our Pupil Council. The election of the Pupil Council members reflects our British electoral system and demonstrates democracy in action: candidates prepare to talk to their peers about their vision, pupils consider characteristics important for an elected representative, pupils vote in secret etc.

The council is made up of two representatives from each class, plus a school council chair and vice chairperson. The Pupil Council meets regularly to discuss issues raised by different classes. In the past, the Pupil Council has chosen local charities to support, conducted a sensible parking campaign and visited Parliament in London to gain a deeper insight into our Democratic System as well as holding a Pupil Council meeting at the local town hall.

Other examples of ‘pupil voice’ are:

• Children agree their Class Rules at the start of term
• Children have the opportunity to form groups and clubs
• Pupils monitor and evaluate behaviour / rewards in school and feedback to classes
• Play Leaders are trained to support pupils in meaningful play at lunchtimes. They apply for this position and are interviewed. 

Rules and Laws

The importance of rules and laws, whether they be those that govern our school or our country, are referred to and reinforced often, such as in assemblies and when reflecting on behaviour choices. At the start of the school year, each class discusses and sets its own class rules, a set of principles that are clearly understood by all and seen to be necessary to ensure that every class member is able to learn in a safe and ordered environment.

Our pupils can demonstrate what our rules would look like in their daily actions. These values are reinforced in other ways:

• Visits from authorities such as the police and fire service
• During Religious Education, when rules for particular faiths are thought about
• During other school subjects, where there is respect and appreciation for different rules – in a sports lesson, for example

Individual Liberty

Alongside rules and laws, we promote freedom of choice and the right to respectfully express views and beliefs. Through the provision of a safe, supportive environment and empowering education, we provide boundaries for our young pupils to make choices safely; for example:

• Choices about what learning challenge or activity to do
• Choices around the participation in extra-curricular activities
• Choices about lunchtime options

Our pupils are encouraged to know, understand and exercise their rights and personal freedoms and are taught how to exercise these safely, such as in our e-safety, drug, relationship and PSHCE lessons.

Mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs

Ark Blacklands Primary Academy is in an area which serves a mainly white British population, however this is changing and it is vital we prepare our pupils to exist in an area that is rapidly changing culturally. We are proud to promote and celebrate the different backgrounds and beliefs that our pupils are encountering on a daily basis. Mutual respect is implicit in our aims and ethos.

Our pupils know and understand that it is expected that respect is shown to everyone, whatever differences we may have, and to everything, whether it is a school resource or a religious belief.

Children learn that their behaviour choices have an effect on their own rights and those of others. All members of the school community should treat each other with respect.

Specific examples of how we enhance pupils understanding and respect for different faiths and beliefs are:

• Through religious education and other lessons where we might develop awareness and appreciation of other cultures – in English through fiction and in art by considering culture from other parts of the world.
• In depth study during community themed weeks, where we celebrate and enjoy learning about the differences in countries and cultures around the world

Sadly, no school can guarantee that there will never be instances which are contrary to this value. At Ark Blacklands, such instances are rare and are treated seriously.

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We want all children to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to live healthy and active lives. We have been awarded the internationally renowned Healthy School award, which recognises our school’s healthy practices.

All Ark Blacklands children have the opportunity to participate in many healthy, positive activities both during and outside school hours. All children participate in lots of Physical Education on a regular basis. We also run several in-school and after-school clubs and activities.

Our school offers each child the opportunity to purchase healthy, delicious school lunches each day (please note that from September, 2014, every child in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 is entitled to a free hot school lunch).