Ribbleton Avenue Methodist Junior School

When people talk about RAMJS, they often refer to the love that is felt throughout the school.  We consider ourselves to be one large family and use our value system to promote harmony across school.  Whilst in an ideal world, there would be continuous harmony, we build restorative practices into our daily school life to support pupils in build and maintaining strong relationships.

This starts from the moment the children start at school:

• breakfast club is run daily, staffed by 4 members of the school team to ensure that the children see a familiar face the moment they are on the school premise.  This informal setting allows the children to enjoy a proper breakfast whilst sitting at dining tables and conversing with their peers.
• Lunch time follows a similar pattern with children on allocated tables with friends from their class and from another year group.  This reduces the stress that comes with trying to find a place to sit and ‘Family dining’ means that the children also have a familiar and friendly face to sit with at lunch time.

• We recognise that everyone makes mistakes, and everyone deserves forgiveness.  Children are given the opportunity to work through their problems in restorative sessions that are held with staff.  To support staff wellbeing, the members of the SLT will facilitate these conversations during lunchtimes and will use key questions to help the children reflect on an incident and restore their relationships with pupils or staff where required:

• What happened?
• What were you thinking at this time (self-reflection)
• What have you thought since? (Possible change of attitude)
• How did this make other people feel?
• Who has been affected?
• What should we do to put things right?
• How can we do things to put things right in the future?

We teach the children about the importance of forgiveness and include the children impacted on in a restoration session once everyone is ready.  Our children recognise that others make mistakes and this restorative approach allows anyone impacted upon to share their feelings. 

We facilitate discussions through our curriculum our school community encourages constructive feedback and we expect to be positively challenged; this starts in the staff room and filters out across the school.

To enable parents a sounding board, the SLT offer an open-door policy, being visual throughout school and accessible.  This allows our community to be open to us and we find that our working relationships with our parent community are extremely strong.  This is evident in the number of family members attending our celebration worship on a weekly basis, or the number of parents and toddlers attending our Toddler Group, Coffee morning and, Active Toddler sessions which promote communication with school but also encourage our families to work with their younger children to develop their Speech and Language skills as well as their Gross Motor skills. (See FSW page)

When we find one of our family members in crisis (both school staff and school families) we work together as a team to support their need.  This may include:

• Counselling
• Food parcels
• Mother’s Day shop for our children to buy a gift for their parents (Gift donated by staff, family and friends as a way to give back and support school)
• Access to our Family Support Team
• Someone to talk too

When we find one of our family members in crisis (both school staff and school families) we work together as a team to support their need.  This may include:

• Counselling
• Food parcels
• Mother’s Day shop for our children to buy a gift for their parents (Gift donated by staff, family and friends as a way to give back and support school)
• Access to our Family Support Team
• Someone to talk too

This keeps us strong and united and enables us to provide the best for our children.  We support families in access CAHMS support or the Family and Wellbeing service.  We also provide alternate provision, for children with additional needs, as we firmly believe that with a unique approach and careful distribution of resources, we can support children to be school ready.  Our Hub is accessed by children for 1:1 work, permeant support as well as timetabled support and this helps us to keep our children in a mainstream setting.  When twinned with FSW work and access to parenting support course etc, it impacts on the wider family.  We simply believe that it is our core duty to do all we can for our children, their families and our staff to ensure that our school family makes our world a better place. 

We love our true diversity and combine this with our love of celebrations meaning that we celebrate our uniqueness and our differences wherever we can.  We have regular theme weeks focusing on periods of history, religious events and cultures to ensure that everyone feels part of our school. 

(See Our Faith Days)

Covid Reflections

As part of our Covid response, we ensured that we increased our support for families, to ensure that they had access to the right provision throughout the challenging times that Covid brought.

We ensured that all families on FSM received food parcels or food vouchers, and this has continued as part of the Eden Red support.

For families who were not eligible for this funding, school accessed local provision and made additional monetary vouchers available for those families where parents may have lost employment or struggling due to the furlough scheme.

Where families were unable to access remote learning, full learning packs and resources (pens, paper, coloring pencils and felt tips) were provided.  School also provided school tablets for children to use at home and once the DFE laptop scheme was in place, school obtained and distributed enough laptops to support all families in the school.

School provided remote and telephone check in for all pupils who needs additional support and scheduled group activities to continue such as SEND learning provision and SAP/EBD groups with our Family Support team.

Where it was felt that children should be in school, we extended the invitation to children who families did not fall under the Vulnerable or Critical worker category.  We also provided free meals to all staff and children attending the provision as we felt that it was important to reduce the additional stresses/restrictions and limitations Covid had caused to food shopping/money.

To help those children who felt isolated, we paid for sports provision to ensure that every child in school had, once safe to do so, the opportunity to meet with their friends for some sporting activties.  We also opened the school to as many children as we felt we could from June 2020.  We remained open throughout the school holidays to provide consistency and child care for our key worker families and established lots of resources via our website for children and families to access to increase their enjoyment whilst we were in lock-down.

On occasions where we had food left over, we shared these with local charities/shelters and visited the elderly in sheltered accommodation, providing them with some provisions to keep them going whilst food sources were limited and prior to the vaccine program.

We felt it was our moral duty to help as many people as we could for as long as we could, using a variety of ways to do so.

Next Steps:

• Look at further opportunities to build on our community involvement with the school

Look for positive ways in which our children can do good for the wider community