A Learning Community - Welcome from The Headlearner

 “We want our children to be happy and healthy today, fulfilled in the future

and able to make their world an even better place.”

"Milton Road is a happy, creative, welcoming and successful primary school in the north of the historic City of Cambridge. Milton Road serves children and families from within the school's catchment area and beyond. We are very proud of the linguistic, social, and cultural diversity of the families that we serve and we take an active role in our community. The school was last inspected by Ofsted on the 23^rd May 2018 and was judged to be Good.

There is a strong community feel to Milton Road with considerate and supportive parents and carers, a wonderful PTA, a dedicated and talented collegiate faculty of educators, an effective and skilled governing body and delightful, enthusiastic, confident, thoughtful and articulate children.

I have been the Head teacher of Milton Road since January 2020. I am an experienced head teacher, this is my second headship in Cambridge and I have been a systems leader and headteacher for over 17 years. I have written two book on school leadership published Bloomsbury. 

"We are crew not passengers" captures a central element of the school’s ethos. Milton Road's on-going success is a team effort and we all work hard to ensure that the children have a positive learning experience every day.

Our curriculum is designed around a compass to signify that we offer a holistic whole education; one which develops the whole child: the personal, social, academic, and moral.

This model is based on the work of many thought leaders including Valerie Hannon's Thrive model. Our ambition is also captured in the curriculum words that you will see on our website of Identity, Connection, Adventure, Citizenship and Planet. These words emerged following a consultation ( a Dream for Our School) with staff, children, parents and other stakeholders in February 2020. 

At Milton Road we value and celebrate the uniqueness of every child. We personalise our approach as much as possible and provide rich learning opportunities (for children and colleagues) designed to promote pro-social and sustainable "future-proof" skills. We use Skills Builder as our framework to  teach eight essential skills, Listening, Speaking, Problem Solving, Creativity, Staying Positive, Aiming High, Leadership and Teamwork.

Milton Road is a values based school. A number of values including Empathy, Kindness, Creativity, Inclusion and Collaboration influence the way that we play, learn and work in our school as well as the day to day experiences for our community. Aligning with CREW we have four core values to help the school realise its aim: these are Courage (South) Responsibility (North) Excellence (East) Wisdom (West).

We encourage our children to be self-motivated and active learners and they are invited to work with peers and family members on projects at school and at home and use our learning platform SeeSaw as a portfolio to capture all their learning experiences.  The curriculum provides opportunities for children to research, make, bake, design, perform, write, investigate and create and at the end of every term the children have an opportunity to demonstrate their skills and knowledge through an Expert Showcase presentation.

Pupils from Year 2 onwards have access to Century Tech which is an online resource that includes access to BBC Bite Size. Through this platform, which is powered by AI children can access a suite of Learning Resources for Maths, English, Science and other subjects that is personalised to their age and stage of learning which they can access at home to support with Home Learning.

We encourage our pupils to be confident and articulate communicators, to think of themselves as global citizens with a developing awareness of broad social and ecological issues and to understand that they can be changemakers with the power to make a positive difference in their school, community and world. A group of pupils are elected each year to represent their classmates and be members of the young eco-citizens. This group of children listen to the ideas of their classmates and identify school -wide campaigns to work on that will improve issues for others in the school or our neighbourhood. In addition, Milton Road School is very proud to be a member of the newly forming Chapter of Citizens UK. 

We take a holistic approach to well-being and that includes being part of the Well School’s partnership of schools. Well School places just as much emphasis on the health and wellbeing of its young people and staff as it does on academic outcomes. Academic attainment is of course highly important to us, but as a Well School we know we must take care of our staff and our pupils wellbeing to create a culture that allows everyone to reach their full potential. To do this we use a wide range of strategies including training for colleagues, promoting Active Travel and physical education, sports and games (at least two hours per week) active lunchtimes, Healthy School Lunches, Personal, Health and Social Education, a Well-Being Policy for staff, pedagogy that promotes a positive sense of self-worth, resilience, confidence and belonging (CREW) and mental fitness by incorporating mindfulness techniques into our curriculum. 

We are proud to work with Premier Education and other partners so that we can offer a wide range of additional opportunities, including clubs for Languages, Art, Drama and Dance, Coding, Multi-Sports, Breakfast and After School Club, Wrap Around Care and Holiday Clubs, a 1:1 specialist Music lessons.

Milton Road is a forward thinking, outward reaching and agile learning community, working in the education eco-system with parents, volunteers and a wide range of national and international educational and other partners to ensure that we offer an excellent, inspiring and ambitious curriculum, underpinned by effective, relevant, research-informed pedagogy.

Built in 2005 our wonderful school building is a stimulating and unique learning environment. We offer a calm, attractive, positive, peaceful and purposeful school with well-ventilated classrooms, group rooms, learning corridors, a purpously designed Arts Studio, a fabulous courtyard space with large sized chess, the Michael Rosen Library, a Bistro with outdoor seating, pod seating outside every classroom, our “Wonder Wood” forest school and pond area, beautiful play grounds with sandpits and exciting climbing frames, as well as kind, thoughtful and highly skilled teachers and assistant teachers.

Milton Road has a lot to offer our children and we always keep them at the heart of everything we do!

Thank you for joining Milton Road, this is our community. Let’s see where the adventure takes us and what we can do together!"

#WeAreCrew 

Rae Snape

Headteacher and National Leader of Education