Enrichment and Personal Development

Find out more information about how we enrich the curriculum by clicking on the corresponding image.

Enrichment in our school gives children new opportunities to become inspired and helps teachers to nurture the children’s talents. By taking part in performances, competing and meeting pupils from other schools, our children will become more rounded and confident individuals and take a more active role in their own lives.

At Ryecroft Primary Academy, we strongly believe that taking learning outside of the classroom broadens and enhances pupils’ learning. Because of this, we offer our children a range of trips and experiences linked to our curriculum. We ensure that children have taken part in a range of high-quality experiences throughout their time at Ryecroft.

Our curriculum is designed to extend beyond the academic; it is designed for our community and wider society. We want our pupils to experience a wide range of opportunities in our ever-changing world. We focus on developing pupils’ moral, spiritual, social and cultural understanding so that they are well-prepared for life in modern Britain. We aim to introduce them to a wide breadth of opportunities to enable them to make informed choices about their future careers. We ensure that during their time at Ryecroft Primary Academy, children are offered a variety of enrichment opportunities. Our academy provides an inclusive environment where all learners enjoy their education. We plan our curriculum and learning opportunities, so all pupils have access to a broad and balanced curriculum.

Our PSHE and RSE curriculum helps pupils to understand how to keep themselves safe. Pupils can explore and debate issues which affect our local community and wider society. These include internet safety, CSE, radicalisation and knife crime. We want pupils to be aspirational and make good choices. We want them to understand what they need to do to reach and succeed in the careers to which they aspire.

All pupils experience a rich PSHE and SMSC curriculum, including British values and RSE.

Pupil Leadership

Children are a key part of our school and therefore each year, we hold democratic elections to select representatives from each year to sit on the Academy Council. The members then meet with Miss Wrightson to discuss school issues, or things that the children would like to raise, representing their classes wishes and feelings.

Pupils also have the opportunity to apply for key roles such as librarians, running our reward shop or setting up sports activities at break time. This encourages children to take ownership of our school as a collective enterprise, which we all contribute to and try to improve.

This is a key part of British Values in action.

Charity

The school community has raised money for a number of causes. One of these was Bone Cancer Research. The charity was chosen by the Academy Council and the children were able to raise over £100.

DARE Programme – Life skills

In Year 6, our pupils take part in the DARE programme. This programme is designed to inform, educate and prepare pupils for everyday situations that they may face. The programme provides a decision making process model and resistance strategies. It also helps pupils to understand personal responsibility and consequences.

Areas covered include coverage around:

Drugs, alcohol, knife crime, hate crime, stress, peer pressure, and communication.

Sports

As well as a high-quality PE curriculum, children at Ryecroft are able to participate in a vast range of sporting events, which include inter and intra-school opportunities. We participate in a number of competitive events, for example football, athletics and more. Within this, we have provision to promote inclusion of all groups.

Votes for Schools

Each week we take part in the Votes for Schools poll, across KS1 and KS2 (Years 1-6). Votes for Schools is a key element of our curriculum, including rich exposure to issues involving British Values and social, moral, spiritual and cultural development. The approach allows pupils to consider current world issues and have their say in terms of the opinion they develop on a question over the course of the week. The week starts with a school assembly and then later in the week their is a further class based sessions, which ends with a vote.

Please see the results of a recent poll, which asked do you think alien life exists?

School Proms

Our school choir took part in the School Proms 2024. This is involves the school joining other schools to form a huge choir and perform to parents. Prior to this, the children spend time learning the songs and developing their singing and performance skills.

Community

We are passionate about developing our children’s understanding of community. We have #NotOurRubbishButOurCommunity where we go out into the community with pupils, parents and members of the community to litter pick around our school.

We have our newly formed FORyecroft (Friends of Ryecroft) who meet in school on a Thursday at 9am.

For more information please click on the link below.

We have held our Harvest and Christmas celebrations at St Christopher’s Church and we donated food for their Food Bank.

Our local community PCSOs come into school to work with children to deliver workshops on the dangers of knife crime, throwing fireworks and how to keep themselves safe.

We also invite parents in for stay and play sessions, story time at the end of the day, performances such as Year 6 Leavers’ assembly.

Each academic year our Year 6 pupils invite their parents in for a 3 course meal that has been budgeted, bought and made all by them. This year the restaurant will be open on Thursday 27th June.

Please see links to further information on our offer in these areas: