Growing Minds Through Adventurous Learning at the Junior School

Mr Innes, Deputy Head at King Edward's Junior School, reflects on the Junior School's approach to learning.

Like all good schools, we aim to equip every child with the skills and knowledge they will need to be successful, but neither of these is as important to a child’s future success as their personal attitudes, their values and their mindset; to paraphrase Henry Ford, the American entrepreneur, if a pupil thinks they can or they can’t, they are right. 

If children learn to trust and respect themselves, they will develop the resilience needed to take risks, to fail and to learn. If they are prepared to engage with challenging things, they will learn to persist in the face of failure, becoming more confident each time they get back into their personal ‘learning pit.’ To get into difficulties with challenging learning and to keep going until it has been mastered takes a whole host of personal qualities and attitudes.

This affects everything we do at King Edward’s Junior School. For instance, we set children for maths according to their learning style, their social needs, their strengths and their mindset rather than their previous test scores. Of course, we still take their attainment into account, but critical to the progress they will make is the attitude they take to maths; do they want to find out more? How well can they cope with challenge? Are they able to adapt, reason, suggest and create?

Much of our effort is focused on developing the ‘invisible’ qualities of each learner. Where do the happiness and self-esteem of each pupil figure in that approach? How can we be sure that we are creating lifelong learners, not just people who can memorise stuff?

At the Junior School, our ethos has always been to nurture key values and attitudes in all who join our community. This can take the form of a discrete lesson of PSHEE, where children spend time analyzing what it means to have personal drive. It could happen in assembly, when the children are discussing how respect is shown in daily interactions at school. Yet every lesson is also an opportunity to review what each pupil has learned, how they have learned it, how they feel about their learning, and which key attitudes and behaviours they employed to learn it.  

In history, for example, we could simply learn how Britain protected itself on the Home Front in World War 2. However, we go beyond that to question the effectiveness of the government’s preparations, and to decide how wartime propaganda changed the way people saw evacuation, the Blackout, bomb shelters and rationing. The Past is something to be questioned, not a series of lessons to be memorized.

We believe that this focus on the whole person leads to happy, confident and self-aware learners, who are ready to take on the challenges of an ever-changing World. 

Intellectual rigour is underpinned by excellent pastoral care - these kids really seem to thrive

Good Schools Guide 2021