Pastoral Care

At Parkgate House, our aim is to provide the highest quality pastoral care throughout the school. All staff work together to help pupils achieve their best, educationally, socially and emotionally. This ensures children are safe, happy, involved and able to perform to the very best of their ability. Any problems or difficulties for the children are spotted early and dealt with appropriately. Every member of staff is committed to supporting the emotional health and well-being of all of our children and their families, and our pupils are always encouraged to talk to their teachers about any concerns or worries. 

Offering far more than academic success, we prepare our pupils for the challenges life throws at them. Life has changed so much in recent times and we want our pupils to go out into the world with the confidence, optimism and resilience that allows them to tackle every twist and turn they meet on their journey through school and into adulthood. This is why we devote so much attention to the pastoral care and wellbeing of our pupils. The size of our school and our purposefully small classes mean that we can offer individual care, allowing every pupil to grow and develop at a pace that’s right for them. We want our pupils to meet change and embrace challenges, and not fear them.  We see the value this adds to our pupils’ academic results and to their development as creative, independent thinkers, who are always willing to have a go. 

We have always been aware of the strong link between pupils being resilient and performing at the maximum of their ability; this awareness strengthened our desire to proactively build resilience in our pupils. We have developed our very own scale for measuring pupils’ resilience. Teachers use this in class to identify pupils’ level of resilience and then apply a range of tailored intervention strategies to improve resilience further. Our Parkgate resilience resources have now been incorporated into the Jigsaw PSHE programme, used by over 7000 schools in 20 countries. 

Mindfulness lessons happen regularly, and pupils are taught how to develop a positive growth mindset. Our teachers carefully monitor our children each and every day. Any child we have concerns about has the opportunity to have one to one sessions weekly with our Deputy Head and pastoral care lead. If we feel more support is needed we take the necessary action; for example, looking to external professionals.  

We are a school family and our pupils are encouraged and given every opportunity to share any worries or concerns with our teachers, whether that’s their form teacher, our specialist teachers or our Deputy or Headteacher. Children are aware of many routes of discussing concerns or worries and their first port of call is usually their Form Teacher who also leads their weekly PSHE lessons. We have Wellbeing Boxes in all classrooms which encourage children to share any thoughts or worries they may have by writing their teacher a note if this is something they find helpful in starting conversations. It doesn’t matter when or where; we are always available to stop what we are doing, listen and help our pupils.     

“The school’s pastoral care is genuinely exceptional – the size, the House system and the emphasis on values and virtues come together beautifully.  The children all know the older and younger children and are taught very much to help one another out – this is in all sorts of formal and informal ways.  The House Captain is a Year 5 or 6 pupil who genuinely cares and helps out my son who is in Year 2. When their House won the tug of war competition, they jumped up and gave each other the biggest hug – it was so sweet.  The children are all treated really well by one another which means they are totally confident being kind at school and in the real world.”

Parkgate parent