Pastoral Care

At Broomfield House School, we value each child as an individual and strive to help them develop as the people they are.  We do this by working hard to meet their differing needs and by offering many opportunities for personal development within a broad curriculum and through a wide range of clubs and activities.  Our Individual Learning Enhancement (ILE) programme gives every child a personal support arrangement delivered either one-to-one or in small groups.  This bespoke service covers academic, social, emotional or behavioural needs and is truly individualised.

Our PSHEE curriculum, focusing on health and wellbeing, is designed to give our pupils the knowledge, skills and understanding to lead positive and happy lives as well as developing their independence and celebrating their individuality.  We explore ideas about how to be comfortable in our own skin, to appreciate our unique strengths and tackle areas we want to develop, to be fit and healthy and to be able to imagine our futures by identifying our dreams and goals.  These concepts are continuously reinforced through our assemblies.

Our core values are communicated throughout school in a number of practical ways. We have high expectations for behaviour at Broomfield and reward positive conduct at every opportunity, within agreed procedures to achieve consistency and fairness.

In recognition of the attitudes that help make school a happy and supportive place, each half term we choose a child from each year to receive the Headteacher’s Award.  This is given to children who consistently reflect the Broomfield values; Curiosity, Creativity, Courage and Kindness.  The award is highly sought-after and the winners enjoy afternoon tea with the Senior Leadership Team, with delicious sandwiches and cakes baked by our own Chef.

Similarly, each week a Polite Person is nominated in each class and is acknowledged for their good manners in our Friday whole school assembly.  We also recognise those year groups who have moved calmly, considerately and quietly around school, conducted themselves well, engaged effectively in their learning, behaved kindly and shown good manners by permitting them to display the Smart Class poster in their classrooms.

On Wednesdays and Fridays in assembly we come together and celebrate our achievements as a ‘family’, recognising the full breadth of success within school, the classroom and in external clubs and competitions.  We want to appreciate the whole child, not just the parts of their lives we see in school.  We also take every opportunity to reinforce the Fundamental British Values and to develop children’s Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural growth.

Our proactive measures for pupil wellbeing include a variety of mechanisms to canvass children’s views, experiences and feelings.  A key one for us is the termly Happiness Survey, in which we explicitly seek to understand if there are things we can do to help our children feel happy and confident in school and in their friendships.  We have a range of strategies for children to share their worries and a buddy system for new pupils.

For children going through social or emotional challenges, we have systems in place to offer support and, within our staff, we have fully trained Emotional Literacy Support Assistants as well as a certified Youth Mental Health First Aider.  LEGO Club can be a terrific vehicle for children feeling less confident socially to build up their social skills on a joint project.

Our House system helps reinforce the feeling of belonging as well as enabling the children to mix with others across the year groups. Children from Year 2 upwards join either Mead, Palmer or Rose House which are named after previous Headteachers.

During the weekly House lunch the children get to eat with their Housemates and take part in fun quizzes.  Each House has a charity that it supports and they hold cake sales and raffles in order to raise money.  The system also allows the children to play more competitive sport and compete in academic contests such as our annual Spelling Bee and Broomfield’s General Knowledge Challenge.

We have created a number of opportunities throughout the academic year for the older children to support and teach the younger members of the school.  These initiatives include:

• the friendship bench, to reintegrate children into playground games
• the reading bench, where the Year 6 Reading Team bring baskets of books for the children to share during playtime
• sharing creative writing tasks between Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 classes
• Year 6 reading buddies who come to the younger classes to support and encourage less confident readers.
• Year 5 children teach Year 1 to tie their ties as they transition into full school uniform
• older children teach the younger children how to play chess.

Broomfield enjoys a well-established partnership with our local community police officer, who makes regular visits to the school to talk to both pupils and parents about issues affecting our local area of Richmond.  During assemblies and class visits, which are adapted for the different age groups, the children learn about stranger danger and staying safe online.  Parents are invited to coffee morning meetings where they can learn about how to protect their children online as well as in the wider community and they are given the opportunity to ask any questions they may have about keeping their children safe.

To develop an awareness of safety in our community we work with teams from Richmond Council to run Scooter training with Year 2, Safe Walking training with Year 3 and Cycling Proficiency with Year 6.

Broomfield works to help to parents in managing their child’s online life.  In Early Years the children take DigiDog home with them and explain to him how to be safe using the internet as a way of reinforcing key messages.  Our computing curriculum teaches all children about eSafety and Year 3 do an extended project on this culminating in posters which are displayed in school.

In Year 6 pupils are given roles and responsibilities to lead areas of school life, such as Head Boy and Girl, House and Sports Captains.

Our Pupil Council offers opportunities for children in Years 3-5 to represent their House and make recommendations for how we can improve the Broomfield experience.

In Year 4 the class runs an enterprise project where the emphasis is for the children to learn the value of teamwork.  They make and sell elderflower cordial for a stall at Kew Fete, developing subgroups to manage the financing, marketing and logistics, soon recognising they can achieve more together than by working alone.  Their reward is to spend the profits on something special that they can all enjoy together.

Our Year 6 children also enjoy opportunities to study citizenship through visits to the Houses of Parliament, Lavender Hill Magistrates Court, and the Junior Citizen Programme.  All these show how we all need to be active members of society and how we can use our voices to contribute to the greater good.