LANGSTONE Primary School is a school with a real focus on standards while being mindful of children’s wellbeing.

At Langstone Primary, which has just over 300 students and opened 63 years ago, they try to educate the whole child.

“Since September, we’ve embraced new areas of learning such as expressive arts, including dance and drama,” said headteacher Beverley Cole. “Our curriculum focuses on these six areas: expressive arts, health and wellbeing, humanities, languages, maths and science.

“Our curriculum focuses on the type of child we want to develop. We’re trying to make children that are ambitious, enterprising, creative, confident and ready to learn and work.

“This is part of our work with the Welsh Government, who is currently reviewing the curriculum in Welsh schools."

Langstone Primary, which had its last Estyn report in 2014 and it was excellent, has been chosen by the Welsh Government to be a professional, pioneering school – meaning they’re the type of pioneer school that focuses on the development of staff and getting them ready to embrace the new curriculum.

“It has been a very exciting journey as we’ve been involved since the beginning,” Mrs Cole said. “It’s about us having the confidence to make room for the new areas of learning.

“The curriculum in Wales was focused on literacy and numeracy until now – we’re now looking to embrace these six areas of learning.”

Mrs Cole said that they have secured funding of £13,000 with another school to develop creativity and that they are also working to take digital competency to the next level.

She said: “We’ve a group of pupils who’re digital leaders. They’re the backbone of technology in the school, we could not manage without them.

“They offer training to teachers and the pupils and we’re now making video blogs, which we use to share the school news.

“We’re also moving to online learning, which can be used at home too.

“We use a programme called Mathletics and another called Spellodrome.

“The pupils see it as a game and can use it at home as well.”

The school is also involved in the training of others and trains teachers. They have teachers who go the school and are trained by their staff.

One of their maths teacher, Sarah Isaac, works with schools across Newport and South East Wales.

Ms Isaac said: “It’s my role to give support to other schools to raise standards of maths teaching and help the teachers here.

“I make sure our maths teaching is fun and interactive and, at the same time, continuous and constructive.”

Over many years, Langstone Primary has been working on the kind of learning behaviour they want their children to have.

They’ve recently introduced “Growth Mindset” – which teaches pupils that’s fine to be stuck but that, it’s at that moment that they’ve to embrace what will help them, such as working with other people.

“It’s what we call the learning pit and each class has one,” said Mrs Cole. “The children are learning the power of yet – ‘I can’t do my laces up yet, for example.’

“We’ve been using the film Eddie the Eagle, which shows him on his journey to the Olympics.

“It’s a good film to show them how to achieve their goals as he faces a lot of obstacles but he carries on.

“He could have given up but he didn’t.

“What’s more, Eddie himself paid us a visit at the beginning of November.”

The school has several extracurricular activities as each teacher runs an after school club which is free, including the pupil voice groups.

“We really area about the whole child and their wellbeing,” said Mrs Cole. “We’ve invested a lot of money on the play area as the children’s health and wellbeing is very important to us.

“We’ve invested in a gazebo and tricycles, for example.

“Our healthy school club is run by staff and children and they organise play in the break.

“We look at healthy eating and, on Friday, the children have eaten more healthily are rewarded.

“More than anything else, we’re a happy school because there’s a real family feel to it.

“Our pupils come from little villages from around here and more than 100 pupils come to our breakfast club at 8am, which is good for both the parents and the children.”

The school has close links with the community and, a couple of weeks ago, they had their Christmas party, which was sponsored by Robert’s and Co and led by the PTA.

They raised more than £1,200 for a new play year. Also recently, the school choir has performed at a couple of local churches.

MOTTO Learning promotes success

CHAIRMAN OF GOVERNORS Wendy Edwards

HEADTEACHER Beverley Cole

NUMBER OF PUPILS 306 students

AGE OF PUPILS 4-11

LAST INSPECTION 2014