Days Lane Primary School

At Days Lane, developing the ‘whole child’ is at the heart of everything we do. The curriculum we have designed is underpinned by our core values to ensure that all children understand and demonstrate: Respect, Resilience, Responsibility, Community, Compassion and Excellence. This is embedded in all aspects of school life and supports children’s academic, social, moral, spiritual and cultural development, resulting in confident, well-rounded individuals that are questioning and curious in their approach to learning and life.

We believe that our children achieve ‘personal excellence’ through the teaching and modelling of our core values, which equip children with the key skills needed to become active, responsible citizens. Children quickly develop the sense of belonging to a tightly knit community where they have the confidence and skills to make decisions, self-evaluate, make connections and leave us as well-rounded young people.

Core Values

We created our core values in consultation with key stakeholders, and launched them across the school community through assemblies, parent letters and the introduction of our core value characters (Robo Respect, Reggie Responsibility, Rex Resilience, Colin & Cara Compassion, Connie Community and Elma Excellence), who represent specific value behaviours. In order to raise their profile we had the characters made into puppets, to provide a physical/ visual presence that children could relate to. The puppets are part of circle times, assemblies and visible on the school gates e.g. when children returned to school after the lockdown, to provide a stimulus and promote dialogue about our values.

Additionally, we created a story for each character related to their physical appearance e.g. Rex Resilience wears strong boots to help him step over obstacles and each character has linked qualities that are shared with the children verbally and in their Core Values Pupil Book. Please click on the link to read our core value character stories: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_egWCvreU1oCUyybxbNi_3-4XjQSjxfs/view?usp=sharing

Our core values are integrated into all aspects of school life:

• They appear on our learning flips to continually promote high aspirations e.g. referencing the behaviours of Elma Excellence’s, or to encourage children to demonstrate the attributes of Rex Resilience if they are finding learning challenging. The examples below are from this week’s early morning work flips during children’s registration:

• Weekly assemblies link to a core value character, which ensures that our value behaviours are continually referred to; this has helped to instil positive behaviours in our children. Please click on the link for an example assembly PowerPoint: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PQKl4O1By_QzY-gWS279HgkRxeYLsw9Z/view?usp=sharing
• The core value characters have also been integrated into our reward and sanctions systems:
  • Children receive stickers for demonstrating core value behaviours – the stickers have a picture of the core value character their actions relate to.
  • Weekly core value post cards are sent home to parents/children. This has motivated children to adopt our core values and promoted positive behaviour throughout the school as well as reminding parents about promoting our values at home.
  • Reflection forms ask children to evaluate their behaviour against our core values, so they are clear about which behaviours they need to improve.