Community Links

The local shops around Kew Gardens station literally do sparkle for one evening a year when the roads are closed, the shops open late, fairground rides abound and lights and happiness light up the darkest of evenings. Broomfield children are everywhere enjoying the fun with their parents. As part of the festivities we bring our Year 3 pupils to sing a selection of traditional carols. Mrs Bou conducts the children in their first public singing outing as a Broomfield Choir.

Every year, Year 4 work as a team to run the Broomfield stall at Kew Fete. With the support of their Year 4 teaching team, they make and sell elderflower cordial. This was inspired by the US charity initiative, Lemonade Day www.lemonadeday.org, a project aimed at igniting the children’s interest in learning about running a business by starting with the planning and running of a lemonade stall. Our pupils are involved with everything from picking and making the elderflower cordial, learning how to price it, serve and market it, to deciding what to do with any profit they raise.

In 2019 our Chamber Choir, along with some of our talented musicians, spent an afternoon with the Avenue Club in Kew. They sang a variety of songs, some from Honk! which was our Senior Play that year as well as some animal songs. The instrumentalists played a variety of solo pieces to entertain this new audience including Maylea, one of our violinists and winner of the International Golden Strings competition, who played a piece she performed in the winner’s concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

For over twenty years Broomfield has been delighted to present an afternoon of carols and poems to the residents of Cecil Court Care Home in Kew. This tradition began when the mother of our then Music Teacher, Mrs Christine Dickerson, was a resident of Cecil Court. Since those early days we have continued this tradition and in early December each year our Years 5 and 6 pupils arrive at Cecil Court to sing some favourite carols and to recite some Christmas poems. Two of our Year 1 children join them and sing a duet, which is always an affecting moment.

At the end of the concert our children spend some time chatting with the residents of Cecil Court before coming back to school to get on with their lessons.

As part of school life we embrace opportunities to fund raise for a range of charities to encourage compassion and empathy in our pupils as we educate them about about how tough life can be for some children less lucky than themselves.

Children in Years 2 and above join Houses and raise money for their House charities through cake sales, raffles and sponsored events etc. The House Charities are:

Mead House: Pioneer Preparatory School in India

Palmer House: Phoenix Project in Guatemala

Rose House: Chrysalis Youth Empowerment Network in Uganda

We also support other charitable events, including Jeans for Genes, Love in a Box, Odd Socks Day and Save the Children’s Den Day.

Broomfield has historic connections with our local parish church, St Anne’s Kew Green. We have anecdotal evidence to suggest the school has been celebrating its Christmas Carol Service at St Anne’s since it opened in 1876. Our founding headmistress, Miss Sara Eliza Mead is commemorated for her good public works with a plaque in St Anne’s, as is our headmistress from the 1950’s, Miss Phyllis Palmer. Later in the 20th century, Broomfield was honoured to be the subject of one of their special embroidered church cushions, which are mainly dedicated to notable people, especially Royalty, with connections to St Anne’s. At rehearsals for the Carol Service our children love to see whose cushion they are sitting on and whether they have the Broomfield cushion.

We are always delighted to welcome Father Nigel Worn to our Carol Service each year. Broomfield is pleased to support the church’s current fund raising activities in a number of ways. We have a school brick in the car park to commemorate our historic link with St Anne’s, and we always dedicate half of the proceeds of our retiring collection at the Carol Service to the church.

While Broomfield is delighted to support St Anne’s, we educate our children about all the major world faiths and welcome families of all faiths, and none, within our school community.

To find out more about St Anne’s Church please see www.saintanne-kew.org.uk

For over a decade, our Years 4, 5 and 6 pupils have braved the cold on a December evening and sung carols to support Richmond Rotary Club. Mrs Bou plays the keyboard as we sing our favourite traditional and modern carols for commuters as they pass through Richmond train station. The children are wrapped up, warm and smart in their uniforms, while parents have become expert in encouraging the crowd to make donations every year. It is wonderful to bring the happy sound of our children singing to such a public place, to see the smiles on the faces of commuters and to wave at former pupils, parents and staff as they happen past. The children soon learn that we only sing when a train comes in – which is most of the time! Over the years this has enabled us to help Richmond Rotary raise thousands of pounds for a variety of charities generally supporting children. The children are always very excited at the end of their hour’s singing as Richmond Rotary kindly give them chocolates and send them home tired but happy.

We are also very grateful to our local Kew Rotary Club for their support over the years. Most notably, Kew Rotary have kindly donated a beautiful hard back dictionary for every Year 5 child at Broomfield over many years. We present these at Speech Day and nothing could be more appropriate as a gift to a child at this stage in their education, to encourage a love of words and learning. A number of former pupils and parents are members of the Kew Rotary club and we thank them for their kindness in including Broomfield in this initiative.

Every year in October we hold our Harvest Festival. Parents from Year 6 are invited to join the whole school, celebrating with songs and poems from every class, even the very new Pre-Kindergarten children take part, singing for an audience for the first time. Children are encouraged to think about what Harvest Festival means and how important giving to others is in the life of our community.

To put this into practice, our children all bring in a small gift of food as a Harvest offering. The Year 6 children and their parents collect these gifts together and take them, individually boxed with poems and Harvest cards inside, to local elderly people chosen for us by Kew Neighbourhood Association (KNA).

We have collaborated with the KNA for over 10 years on this project and we are proud to be the only school in Kew to personally deliver Harvest gifts to local elderly people. The children really enjoy the experience and the sense of community it engenders, and we are always delighted to receive and read to the children the letters of thanks sent back from grateful recipients.

Information on Kew Neighbourhood Association can be found at www.kna.org.uk

Congratulations -1st Prize Winners!

Our links with Kew Gardens reached a new high in the last couple of weeks of the summer term 2019 when we won £1000 in a competition, having submitted some of our best work on plants into the Kew Endeavour Platform competitions. We were delighted when Abi, Isabella and Karmen from Year 5 won first prize. Representatives from Kew came to Speech Day to present a cheque that was nearly as large as the recipients.

Broomfield invited to be the first Kew Gardens Endeavour Ambassador School

Broomfield is so fortunate to be on the doorstep of Kew Gardens. The science that lies behind one of the world’s greatest botanical gardens is very relevant to our curriculum and their beauty enables the children to enjoy themselves as they learn. As part of the current Science curriculum our Year 4 students attend 6 Kew-led workshops at the gardens each year and students from other classes make numerous visits.

Over the years we have been involved in a number of projects with Kew. Most recently, Broomfield was invited to become Kew Gardens’ first Endeavour Ambassador School. The Endeavour platform is an online teaching resource developed by Kew with Lottery funding, offering plant science challenges for KS2 and KS3 teachers to use with their classes. Opportunities for schools to enter competitions in this area will also be established.

Broomfield piloted the Endeavour challenges before they were formally launched. Our teachers and KS2 students trialled exciting new materials that were relevant to the Science curriculum and fed back our thoughts on them. We were lucky to have the Kew Educators and Endeavour designers in school to present their ideas to us. The Year 3, 4 and 5 teachers launched the challenges with their children and much fun was had in a wide variety of ways, including a new crime scene activity in which the children help the Kew Constabulary solve a plant theft mystery.

This is the latest in a series of ground-breaking projects we have undertaken with Kew. In 2017, Broomfield staff and students were invited to greet HRH the Prince of Wales, the new Patron of Kew Gardens, on a visit there. The children were given a science lesson about Plant Explorers: Past and Present and he observed the children reporting back on what they had learned, before chatting to them about what he loved about Kew.

In 2013, two of our Year 5 children took part in a BBC2 TV series presented by the renowned chef, Raymond Blanc, called Kew on a Plate which was filmed at Kew Gardens. In 2010 our Year 5 students attended the launch of Kew’s campaign to promote peat free compost. The then Cabinet Minister, Hilary Benn, came to talk with our children and together they potted seeds from the Kew seed bank using peat free compost In 2004, we worked with Kew education and horticulture staff to engage children in learning the science and practice of gardening, working on an allotment alongside their horticulture students. This led to the development of our school vegetable patch which continues to this day, producing radishes, tomatoes, potatoes, rhubarb, apples and herbs, which our Chef uses in school lunches! This year our Gardening Club has also been planting bulbs and violas.

Here are Annabel and Stephan in 2005, with the gigantic pumpkin grown in the Broomfield allotment at Kew Gardens.