Personal development

Personal Development is at the heart of everything we do at Heytesbury and we believe that it should be at the centre of the pupil’s learning journey.

Our aim is to support children to develop the knowledge, understanding and skills they need to manage their lives, now and in the future. Personal Development helps pupils to thrive as individuals and build their own character through their primary education.

As a Church School, our Personal Development offer is under-pinned by our Vision and Values. It is weaved into, and is a crucial part, of everything we do from our relationships with the children, to our strong curriculum and extra-curricular opportunities. We view Personal Development as holistic, striking the balance between giving the children meaningful experiences, which they remember forever, without making events tokenistic and sacrificing too much of their daily curriculum offer.

Pupils develop a strength in character from the wide and rich experiences we offer at Heytesbury C of E Primary. Our vision and values, and the learning and opportunities we provide for all pupils, enables them to development their own character and identity.

Pupils develop a positive mind-set and have high aspirations of themselves. This enables them to be courageous, showing determination and self-belief to try new things and see mistakes as opportunities to learn. Therefore, our pupils flourish in all areas: academically, emotionally and personally.

Our pupils build strong foundations during their time at Heytesbury: they hold positive school memories and their Personal Development sets them up for their future.

The Head Teacher (responsible for PHSE, RE, Church School Flourishing and Personal Development) regularly monitors the impact of our Personal Development offer through observations, Floor Book monitoring and the ongoing assessment of pupils through the Thrive Online profiling. We use whole-school pupil surveys and school council to ensure that pupils’ voice is a large part of assessing the impact of Personal Development. We also use Parent View, and responses to both parent and staff surveys, as additional evidence of the impact of our Personal Development curriculum.

Many of the opportunities for our children to develop personally are embedded into the areas below.

• Our Values and Collective Worship
• PSHE and RSE Curriculum
• E-Safety teaching and learning
• British Values and the Protected Characteristics 
• The teaching of Emotional Literacy and Mental Health
• Family lunches
• Opportunities for Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural (SMSC) development
• RE Curriculum
• Student Leadership Opportunities 
• Extra-Curricular Opportunities
• Community Links and Service