Miss Laura Whitwood

Miss Laura Whitwood speaks about the benefits of attending the Junior School, the Forder Programme, their Stuart curriculum and work that takes place with the local Lewisham community.

Could you tell us about the points of entry for the Junior School for families who are considering applying?

There are three main points of entry in our Junior School. We have 3+ entry to start in the Nursery, 4+ for Reception and 7+ for Year 3.

Often, parents think that these are the only potential starting points for their child, but what I would say is that they really shouldn’t rule out considering occasional place entry points for any year group across the Junior School.

What do the entry assessments largely involve?

It’s different for every entry point, as you can well imagine. For a 3+ entry point, it really is a sort of play session. Parents are there with their child - we recommend that only one parent comes in with their child just because of space. The 4+ assessment is a bit more structured, because the children are a little bit older and are able to separate from their parents. The children come in in small groups and the assessment looks like a fun play session, there are stations of activities that they think are games, but one is designed to find out what they’ve done in terms of phonics, one links to maths and counting, another is fine motor skills, all kinds of different things. The 7+ assessment day is really the same as any Prep entry point. We have the children in for a full day, and there are ‘get-to-know-you’ sessions in the morning, so they can make friends and feel comfortable in the new environment. They have a tour to try to settle them before their assessment, and then they go through some computerised assessments in English and Maths and a non-computerised assessment for us to look at their writing. Then they have lunch and a play session, and in the afternoon they go into some taster lessons to see what life at St Dunstan’s is like - it’s a really wonderful day for them!

What would you say are some of the main benefits of attending St Dunstan’s Junior School?

Where do I begin? Every school might have a motto or values and sometimes they just go on the website, but for us we live and breathe our college motto, Albam Exorda. It translates to ‘Adorn the White’ and the idea behind that is that on the first day any pupils joins us here at St Dunstan’s, however old they are, they’re given a metaphorical blank shield - the St Dunstan’s shield. It’s got a tiny picture of St Dunstan in the corner and then the rest of it is totally blank. The idea behind that is that it doesn’t stay blank for long - they soon fill it with all kinds of colour, and that colour is made up of their unique experience and journey through St Dunstan’s. We don’t want you to ever be able to spot a St Dunstan’s pupil, other than the fact that they’re really brave, bold, true to who they are and they embrace their individuality. They love that they have differences from others across the school. I think that that is a real benefit of St Dunstan’s, as it sets the children up for a really positive future. One day, they’ll be really well-rounded adults who will feed into the world with their own skills and attributes and really feel confident being true to who they are.

Can you give us some information on the Junior School’s Stuart Curriculum? What are the benefits of it and how does it differ from the traditional PSHE curriculum? The way that it is loosely set up is that it sits in three key strands: relationships, skills for the future and critical thinking. It’s taught by members of the pastoral team who invest just as much time in these lessons as they do in the English and Maths lessons, and it’s a real forward-thinking approach to teaching those vital skills for whatever the future might hold for pupils. We enable them to realise that education isn’t just about getting good results, it’s not just about English and Maths: it’s actually about them developing into globally minded, responsible citizens of the future who will contribute positively to society.

Could you talk to us about the Junior School’s work with the broader community in Lewisham?

From a Junior School perspective, we’ve done all kinds of things in recent years. One of my favourites actually took place in the festival last year: we had a sort of community choir, with the choir here from St Dunstan’s and choirs from the local community and other state schools in Catford. It was really magical for them to have a whole day together, singing really beautifully, sharing what they’d been working on in their separate choirs just down the road, and the children loved it! They made really good friends with some of those children, and I know that

TURN TO PAGSE 54-55 to read about the benefits of single-sex and co-ed schools connections were made that then carried on outside of just that day and the festival, so that was a really wonderful opportunity.

Within the Forder Programme we have children who go and visit the elderly in a local care home, and they do all kinds of things, so they have to plan in advance. It might be a card game that they’ve created, or they may have been working on an instrumental piece that they want to share; the idea is that they get to know those people and what their interests are and they can think creatively about things they can do together in that time.

Could you tell us more about the Junior School’s co-curricular Forder Programme? And one particularly unique aspect of St Dunstan’s is the Forest School curriculum. Could you explain what that curriculum entails and the reasons behind its implementation?

Yes, so the Forder Programme is named after another pioneering headmaster and it is our cocurricular programme. What’s quite unique about that here at St Dunstan’s is that it’s embedded into the weekly timetable, so there are two lessons in the week that are devoted to a co-curricular programme. Everybody has to participate in those two sessions at the very least, because, of course, life can be busy and sometimes children don’t have access to clubs after school because of logistics, so we want to make sure everybody has equal opportunity. In addition to this, there are activities happening in the morning, at lunch times and after school. Last time I did a count-up, we had just over ninety co-curricular activities taking place in just one week from Reception through to Year 6. What’s really great here at St Dunstan’s is that we don’t really find that the same children pick only the sporty activities or the artistic ones or stay within a certain bubble of the curriculum in terms of what they sign up to. They take it really seriously and try a range of activities. One of my favourite examples from quite recently, I had a chat with a group of Year 5 boys and they do all rugby outside of school and in school through the curriculum, and I was listening to their conversation and they said: “We’ve got to do something slightly different this term, what shall we go for that’s totally out there and doesn’t link to rugby at all?” and there they were, deciding that they’d go to SDC Stitchers, and they were sewing their initials into cushion covers. I just don’t think that you’d get that in every school, the confidence to go and try something totally new and step out of your comfort zone of an area that you think you’re really good at.

How does the Junior School help students during the transition into the Senior School? It’s a fine balance, actually. We’re really lucky in that we have the advantage of being a whole school, and we want to make the most of the comfort that is brought from knowing a school well and it not being a scary step up into Year 7. However, moving up to Year 7 is a really important milestone in education, and we don’t want to take away from how important that is and the change and difference that children should feel when they make that big step. So, we work really hard to try to get the balance right, and it’s sort of a tried-andtested model now that begins in Year 5 and goes on from there.

We make sure we put in place several events that enable our Junior School pupils to integrate with the external pupils who join. It’s really important that we don’t have separation between those who know the College and those that are new, so they are put into different classes and are really mixed up. There are lots of team building activities, treasure hunts, all kinds of things like that, where they can start to make connections with the new children joining the school.

What are the benefits of the Junior School being part of a larger school community like St Dunstan’s College?

As a Junior School within a whole College, we benefit from that enormously, and we do take the whole College setting very seriously. We benefit from additional Senior School resources, state-of-the-art facilities, as well as the subject specialist knowledge that you get in a Senior School and the expertise that comes from that. So, our subject co-ordinators in the Junior School work very closely with the heads of subjects in the Senior School. They look at one another’s development plans, they do shared observations, and ahead of any transition point from Year 6 to Year 7 they’ll go through pupil lists for each subject and share information that they need about pupils ahead of them starting. We also look at lots of enrichment opportunities for children in the Junior School who are particularly interested in a particular area of the curriculum to go over and have a workshop or session run by the Senior School specialists. We also contact the Senior School if we’re doing a particular topic where going over there would be really beneficial to us, and that’s the same from Nursery through to Year 6.

What do you envision for the future of St Dunstan’s Junior School?

For us, it’s been a real journey in terms of us moving into our new building that I’ve just mentioned, and the way in which the Woodland Classroom has evolved. Now, every classroom here in the Junior School - not just in Early Years - has a dedicated outdoor area, including a huge roof terrace for our upper Key Stage 2 pupils, and we didn’t have that in the previous building. So, our next stage, now that we are settled in this building and are used to it and love it, is to look at those spaces, seek the opinion of Pupil Council, see what they want from those outside areas, and start to grow them and evolve them. So, we’ve begun with Early Years, because it’s obviously so important to their learning, and we’re working our way through to the spaces that Year 6 have, to make sure that what we buy is meaningful, purposeful and lends itself well to the curriculum. Had we just thrown money at the outside areas at the very beginning, we never would have developed them in that way, so that’s really our next stage: to continue to grow into this building.

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