Enrichment at UPS
Our Offer
At Urmston primary School, education is more than just mastering English and maths – it’s also about the extraordinary experiences that make learning rich, meaningful, broad, exciting, real and purposeful. Through new encounters and opportunities, we strive to create brighter tomorrows and empower our children to ‘be more’.
We want our children to engage with the world beyond the classroom and strive to give our children new opportunities to try new. We provide varied activities that not only enhance our curriculum, but also develop character. We help to teach life skills that benefit children beyond the classroom, that develop an appreciation for cultural and community issues, teamwork and social responsibility, both through our curriculum and beyond it.
By ‘character’, we mean a set of attitudes, skills and behaviours which we live out through our school values every single day – pride, happiness, respect, responsibility, resilience and kindness, a set of values that we believe enables success within school and also beyond, and which very much fit with our focus on developing the self-awareness of everyone in our school community, particularly our children. These can also be referred to as ‘social and emotional skills’ or ‘essential life skills’. These include the ability to respond to setbacks, work well with others, build relationships, manage emotions and cope with difficult situations.
Extra-curricular enrichment
We encourage all children to get involved in activities outside of their school lessons to enable them to try new things, meet new friends and develop new skills, and we offer a variety of clubs, from skateboarding to bookbinding, that run at different times in the year, and enable our children to explore things that they might not have thought of.
Pupil Leadership Opportunities
Pupil voice is very important to us at Urmston Primary School. We have a well-established school council that give regular feedback about the ideas and opinions of our children to the whole school community. Our Year 6 Play leaders take great pride and responsibility in supporting our younger children at lunchtime and we provide many other opportunities for Year 6 to lead across the school, especially at playtimes.
Our B.I.D.E (Belonging, Inclusion, Diversity, Equality) group ensures that every child’s voice and point of view is heard and considered, led by our SENDCo, Mrs Helyar, and our Eco School team support our community further by providing opportunities to support our environment across the school. We also grow fruit and vegetables in our eco-garden!
Connecting with our local area
Every year we take great pride in providing the opportunity for children in our school to visit our local elderly care home, Urmston Manor. We believe intergenerational interactions promote empathy and kindness and improve communication skills for all. Bringing happiness and joy to others not only builds self-esteem, but helps our children see the world from a different life perspective, connecting with local people, as well as our local area and history.
Each class in our school is connected to a local or national charity. We encourage our children to raise money for their class charity as a class, but individually if they would like to. We also provide many opportunities for our families to get involved with their child’s learning through ‘Grandparents day’ and ‘Open Day’.
Educational trips and visits
Throughout the year we ensure that all of our children get to experience curriculum-related trips and visits or school-based workshops so that our curriculum remains innovative and meets the needs of every learner by deepening children’s learning experiences. In addition, we give our pupils the opportunity to experience the theatre, both within our school setting and at a traditional theatre in Manchester.
We appreciate that financially what we offer can be challenging for some families, therefore, through our wonderful PTA, we are able to subsidise many of our enrichment activities to keep the cost to parents and carers to a minimum. We are grateful to the ‘Friends of UPS’ for the considerable financial support they provide.
Forest school
At Urmston Primary School we ensure that our children get the opportunity to experience forest school every year. We believe that forest school provides an immersive, child-led experience that builds confidence, resilience and independence. By regularly engaging in outdoor activities like den-building we feel that children develop essential life skills, improve their physical coordination and foster a lifelong appreciation for the environment. Forest school allows children to work at their own pace, sparking natural curiosity for the world around them.
Music and ‘The Arts’
Music is important to us at Urmston Primary School. We want every child to have the experience of playing a musical instrument before they leave. We use the Trafford Music Service to not only provide opportunities for individual lessons but we access whole class instrument sessions to build teamwork, strengthen memory and develop sustained attention. Our children get the opportunity to share and perform their music learning for the half term in front of an audience of their peers and when appropriate, they perform to their loved ones and families as well. As well as working with Trafford Music Service to develop our children’s skills in brass, flute, clarinet, drums, and piano, We also work with Front Row Music, where a large number of our children play the guitar and ukelele.
Singing weaves through our curriculum at Urmston Primary School and we provide opportunities for our children to join the school choir and perform before a wider audience in our community. Weekly singing assemblies also provide our children with the opportunity to express themselves through singing and music.
Reading for pleasure
We celebrate and promote reading for pleasure through any author visits. Our local library also comes to visit us once a year to promote the Summer reading challenge. We ensure that all of our EYFS children get the opportunity to visit our local library and are set up for life with the opportunity to borrow and return books. And of course, we always celebrate World Book day, starting with the big book swap at the World Book Day Breakfast and extending to all manner of activities to further remind our children of how wonderful the world of book is!
Making Connections Through Sport
We have numerous sports clubs and UPS, working closely with the PE and Sports Hub (PESH), who provide after school clubs, as well as having an increasing number of diverse sporting activities new to the Olympic Games - such as skateboarding and breakdancing! PESH also work with us with our curriculum offer and extending this to intra-school sporting opportunities and competitions at the end of each PE unit and also, as part of a West Trafford Schools Network, we work with Urmston Grammar to provide opportunities for all of our children throughout the year to compete with other local schools.
We work with the Trafford School Sports Partnership (SSP) to provide further opportunities for our children, with our brilliant Mr Irakoze, leading on other lunch time and other school opportunities, as well as leading our school football teams!
