We hope to develop 3 outdoor areas of the school, including a designated ASN area, with safe surfaces and equipment designed to encourage physical activity and learning through play. The areas will be safe and inclusive for children to increase their social, creative and physical abilities , encouraging attendance and engagement with learning.
Description
The grant will be used to create safe and inclusive play areas in our playground. We are aiming to develop 3 separate spaces which would allow increased opportunities for physical activity as well as creating spaces for creative, social and learning activities.
Area 1 - ASN provision
We are looking to develop the space by installing a rubber floor to replace the current concrete flooring. This area will be available to specific children who find the larger playground overwhelming. This safe and enclosed space will allow for greater opportunities for the pupils to participate in outdoor activities at playtime, lunchtime and during their class learning. At the moment the concrete limits the opportunities we can offer our most vulnerable pupils due to the risk of injury. In this area we would also like to purchase freestanding equipment including a trim trail and outdoor library/reading space.*
Area 2 - P1 and P2
Developing the area outside of the P1 and P2 classrooms would allow for daily opportunities for creative and social play. The space would be developed along similar lines of the ASN space with rubber flooring and freestanding equipment*. In this area we would look to purchase equipment with a focus on creative and imaginative play, this would include a mud kitchen, outdoor sand pit and a story teller area.
Area 3 - P3 Classrooms
Again we would like to develop this into a safe and inclusive play area that can be accessed throughout the day. The rubber flooring would allow for increased opportunities for outdoor learning and social play. In this area we would purchase Dens, Huts and Hideaways* with the view of creating a forest school area.
* We would like to purchase the free standing equipment for the spaces as this would allow us to rotate the equipment between the 3 areas. This would mean the children accessing each area would have access to a variety of context areas throughout the year.
We have engaged with our pupils and parents to gather feedback on how we can improve our school. A consistent area of improvement has been identified as our outdoor spaces, particularly for our younger pupils. We have used this feedback to form the basis of our application.
Steven Rice has also visited other schools to view their outdoor spaces and how they are used to increase opportunities such as increasing sport and exercise and increasing social, learning and creative play.
Our school is situated within an area identified as one of the top 5% most deprived. The area faces many challenges which impact on our pupils, this has led to a lower than average level of attainment and attendance. We believe that developing our outdoor spaces can not only meet the identified targets but can also act as lever to encourage our pupils to attend. The increased opportunities for play, sport and exercise and outdoor learning have been identified by our pupils and we would appreciate your support in meeting this need.
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