Author: ohanlong30

Our Lady of Lourdes Primary
Standards and Quality Report
(Abridged Version)

Basic School Details
Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School and Nursery is a denominational school in East Kilbride. Our roll at the end of June 2018 was 419: 12 classes totalling 319 pupils in the school and 100 children within our nursery (40/40 in the 3-5 year old room and 10/10 within the 2-3 year old room). Our catchment area includes families from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds. Our Senior Leadership Team includes the Head Teacher (Mrs Eileen Brady) and two Depute Head Teachers (Mrs Joanne Blakemore and Mrs Jacqui Cadwallender) as well as one Principal Teacher (Miss Donna Boyle).
Our Vision and Values:

Successful Learners:
All of our children have made progress throughout the year and have shown enthusiasm and motivation for learning. In particular this year, with our focus on Reading, the children (as well as our staff and parents) have been enthused by the new P1-7 Active Reading pedagogy clearly evidenced in a wide range of self-evaluation approaches such as Pupil Voice Discussions and Validated Self-Evaluation feedback from South Lanarkshire Council. .
Successful learning has been noted by our P1-7 pupils in their newly introduced Pupil Profiles taken from their achievements from their Personal Learning Plan targets.
Our children have also shown that they can apply a range of learning in new and challenging situations. For example, our Primary 2 children presented their interdisciplinary learning to parents through their Native American topic demonstrating their applied literacy, numeracy and communication skills as well as creative thinking. Creative skills were also fostered through the Creative Egg competition at Easter where the P4-7 children’s creations were nothing short of spectacular. We also introduced Edward de Bono’s Thinking Hats this year which are being used within all areas of the curriculum to further encourage our children to challenge their thinking.

Confident Individuals:
All of our children are encouraged to improve their sense of physical wellbeing through pursuing a healthy and active lifestyle working closely with our Active Schools’ Coordinator. All of our school pupils take part in 2 hours of quality Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport (PEPAS) per week as well as participating in a range of planned activities such as Judo for our Primary 1 and 2 children, lunchtime and after school clubs (eg Multisports (P3-5), Irish Dancing (P5), Netball, Badminton, Athletics and Football (P6&7) etc). Our Primary 5 pupils are also given a block of swimming lessons and our Primary 7 pupils are also offered a block of Bikeability training. All children take part in our active health day (including activities such as massage and Stepercise).
In order to further ensure that our children are encouraged to be aware of their mental and emotional wellbeing, we are beginning to embed a Growth Mindset approach which is proving to be very successful evidenced within a range of self-evaluation approaches. The children are saying that they can’t do things ‘yet’ and know that if they work hard they can ‘grow their brain’. We also carried out a Family Learning Event for our parents to encourage them to adopt a Growth Mindset approach at home.
Our children are secure in their values and beliefs. Through our Catholic ethos, we promote an inclusive community of faith where we encourage children to communicate their own beliefs and views of the world. All of the pupils take part in whole school RE Assemblies where they explore our Catholic faith and those of other world religions. In our classrooms, our pupils learn about our Roman Catholicism and the religions of their classmates as well as other world religions and respect is promoted for all. Our school values are also embedded as part of our ethos and are also promoted through our whole school assemblies.
The children are given many opportunities to achieve success in different ways from their own class work to taking part in many competitions. Throughout the year, our Euroquiz team won first place in the South Lanarkshire Competition as well as our school choir winning first place in the Rotary Competition. There have also been many successes through our after school clubs such as and our Athletics children placing second in the Indoor Athletics and qualifying for the next round. In addition, many of our children have won individual medals within our badminton and athletics clubs.
At our fortnightly whole school assemblies, we have certificates for Successful Learners, Confident Individuals, Responsible Citizens and Effective Contributors celebrating individual successes in many different areas. The work of the children is displayed on our Successful Learner Board in our school entrance to further celebrate and promote achievement.
The pupils’ wider achievement is also celebrated through our termly Red Carpet Achievement Assemblies where parents are asked to highlight their child’s successes from clubs and activities from home. These assemblies are loved by the children as the red carpet, music and photographs give them a real sense of celebration.

Responsible Citizens
The children are encouraged to become Responsible Citizens. In P1 the children looked after their baby chicks as part of the Living Eggs Project. Our older children were encouraged to show respect for others online through a visit from our community police on anti-bullying.
Our P1-7 children are encouraged to develop their knowledge and understanding of the world and Scotland’s place in it. All the children in the school performed at our Burns’ Day celebration for the whole school. All children learn about other cultures in a range of ways through various topics or other world religion lessons. In order to encourage deep and active learning, our P5/6 children visited the Scottish Parliament this year linked to their class topic of Edinburgh. All of the classes in the school take part in educational visits throughout the year. Our children also help to celebrate diversity within the curriculum (eg Primary 7 led a specific whole school assembly on Celebrating Diversity that looked at exploring cultures, celebrating our own individual strengths etc).
Through our wide variety of fundraising activities for charities both in Scotland and across the world, we have raised lots of money as well as collected in many essential items (eg food parcels and clothing) to be given out to the needy within our community. Our fundraising focuses on the liturgical periods of Advent and Lent and is in line with teachings of the church to ‘give alms’. We also pray for those in need.
Throughout the year, the Eco-Committee encourages in all children a respect for their environment and to help out with making our school a litter free zone.

Effective Contributors:
Our school fosters an enterprising attitude in our pupils throughout the year. All of our pupils took part in the Christmas enterprise project linked to our Christmas Fayre. Our P1 pupils also led a whole school Toy Sale and our Eco Committee led another Fruity Friday event demonstrating their skills for learning, life and work.
Our pupils are also encouraged to take the initiative and lead. Children from P1-7 take part in the Pupil Council, Eco-Committee, Sports’ Council and Reading Representatives making decisions in consultation with their classmates to lead our school forward. This year, through a range of Pupil Voice opportunities, our children helped to create a Promoting Positive Behaviour Policy, an Anti-Bullying Policy and Homework Policy. Indeed our school’s slogan, chosen from one of the many Anti-Bullying activities, is ‘Be a Buddy and a Friend so Bullying will end’. Our Primary 7 children have buddied our Primary 1 children throughout the year showing initiative and leading learning as well as supporting the emotional wellbeing of Primary 1 pupils in many ways, for example, paired reading activities and playground and lunch hall buddying. Our Primary 6 children have also carried out paired reading with our Primary 2 children which has been very successful. Our children led many Family Learning Events such as the Primary 6s teaching their parents some Spanish vocabulary and Spanish culture in order to help support them in their learning. A selection of children from P1-7 also led a Family Learning Event on Reading where they demonstrated what and how they learn in Reading. The parental feedback from this event was terrific and noted that the children did a ‘wonderful job’ and their presentations were ‘wonderfully informative’ (taken from written parent evaluations).
In addition, our children, through many Pupil Voice opportunities (including a Pupil Forum), helped to effectively contribute to our Validated Self-Evaluation in June focusing on learning and engagement in Reading. Our children were praised highly by the visiting team from South Lanarkshire for their communication skills, their behaviour and how knowledgeable they were on leading Reading forward within the school.
The full version of the Standards and Quality Report can be found on our school website.