Awards
At Newlands, we aim to help our children and young people to grow healthily, safely and responsibly. Through the healthy schools' toolkit, we have built upon the underlying principles of the English National Healthy School Programme.
We demonstrate that the health and wellbeing of the children and young people in our care are well catered for by focusing on the following four areas:
- PSHE including 'Relationships and Sex Education' and 'Drug Education’
- Healthy Eating
- Physical Activity
- Emotional Health and Well-being
Our successes at Newlands that support our Healthy Schools status include:
- Curriculum – cookery, PSHE, SRE
- Skip to be fit
- Our extensive range of extra-curricular sports opportunities
- Young Voices
- School Council
- Sports Crew
- Kindness Crew
- Community and fundraising activities
- Football teams
- ELSA
In 2023–2024 and 2024-2025, we achieved the GOLD School Games Award. In order to achieve this, we had to prioritise PE throughout the school in a variety of ways:
* We committed to providing 2 hours of PE, school sport and physical activity per week, which we achieved during curriculum lessons.
* We complimented our high-standard PE teaching with the use of external coaches for tennis and dance. We even enjoyed a disability week when the children were introduced to wheelchair sports – basketball, archery and cricket.
* We provided an extensive variety of lunchtime and after-school activities that included football, dance, hockey, lacrosse, handball, bocca, cricket, multi-skills, dodgeball and even quidditch.
* We showed a clearly planned approach to 60 active minutes and, in particular, the 30 minutes that is provided daily for every child within our school.
* We created positive experiences by ensuring physical activity and competition provision is designed to reflect the motivation, competence and confidence of our young people and has a clear intent. Our intra - competitions ( in school) have included Sports Day, Potted Sports Day, Football Tournament, mini marathons, including a Jingle Jog, orienteering courses, themed races e.g. egg and spoon at Easter and Class v Class competitions. Our inter-competitions (outside of school) have included athletics, tennis, World Cup football, cross-country, multi-skills as well as an 'Eco-warrior' activity at Sherwood Pines and a sports festival.
* We have started to work with the Year 2s from John T Rice, who will be joining our Year 3s to take part in a Potted Sports Competition – an activity specifically designed to help with transition.
* We have used Year 6 sports leaders to organise and support during specific events – Sports Day and Potted Sports day.
* We have promoted the School Sporting Activities and shared our competition intent with parents via our newsletters, text messages, website and display board within school.
2023-2024 and 2024-2025 have been outstanding years for Sport and Physical Activity at Newlands, so we are absolutely delighted to have achieved the GOLD award – definitely the icing on the cake! Thanks to all the staff that have made this possible. We are looking forward to next year already!
We have achieved the WAS award (Wellbeing Award for Schools), which is intended to promote emotional wellbeing and mental health across our school. We are committed to ensuring our school is a place that supports emotional wellbeing and support by improving mental health provision for all pupils and staff. The Wellbeing Award for Schools focusses on changing the long-term culture of our whole school. Using an evidence-based framework to aid change will help us deliver staff and pupil wellbeing, review our staff training and revise our policies. This award will ensure that mental health and wellbeing sits at the heart of our school life. Please see the page below for full details of our wellbeing journey.
Newlands Junior School has been awarded a Quality Mark Award for English and mathematics in recognition of its improved provision, practice and performance. This Quality Mark is awarded for three years and shows how the work that Newlands has implemented in English and mathematics has had a positive impact on pupil progress.
Newlands Junior School actively promotes good behaviour and aims to prevent all forms of bullying among pupils. This year we worked with the anti-bullying alliance in order to review and consolidate our practice.
Our aim is to achieve our vision to stop bullying and create safer environments in which children and young people can live, grow, play and learn.
The Anti-Bullying Award has three main areas of work:
- Supporting learning and sharing best practice through membership
- Raising awareness of bullying through Anti-Bullying Week and other coordinated, shared campaigns
- Delivering programme work at a national and local level to help stop bullying and bring lasting change to children's lives
During the work to gain this award, pupils were surveyed and actively implemented strategies to tackle bullying e.g. The Kindness Crew and Anti-bullying week.