Our Future Skills vision is important even to our littlest people.
Not only do we have high aspirations for their brilliant basics, but we enrich their time with us with the skills and values they will need to become incredible young people, unafraid to tackle the challenges of the future.
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Our Future Skills Vision
The Little Downsend generation is an inspiration to us all, taking their responsibility to make the world a more sustainable place very seriously. We work in tandem with our children to give them a global perspective, appreciating their place in the world, and providing the impetus to make change for the better.
Each Little Downsend has environmental goals, each achieving RHS Garden Awards and the Eco School Green Flag Award for growing their own fruit and vegetables. The Eco-committee is active, vocal and imaginative. Recently during Earth Week, children were encouraged to reflect on environmental challenges and to think of ways to make change and solutions to environmental problems. Bug hotels, wildflower planting, energy conservation, a focus on single use plastics, worm hotels, bird feeders and scavenger hunting – the ideas are endless and enthusiastically implemented!
Alongside this collective approach, we encourage children to have perspective, to think about the bigger picture to find solutions to their own problems. We find this approach develops resilience, flexibility and the ability to cope with change.
Our little people really are a joy to be around. Working with their unique backgrounds, talents and strengths, we put in place a structured and deliberate programme of events, activities, assemblies, visits and online sessions to give children a wide and varied appreciation of diversity and multi-culturalism and a high level of emotional intelligence.
Alongside this, our focus on wellbeing, through initiatives such as Global Be Well Day, an event we celebrate with our global network of Cognita schools, ensures children are able to be mindful and appreciate the importance of resilience for a happy and fulfilled life.
We work with children to develop exceptional communication skills and the confidence to talk to a wide range of people to make their point and to be heard.
There is a natural curiosity that comes with being a little person, so we work with every ounce of creative energy that our children bring to school. We encourage a questioning mindset, giving children a voice to debate the problems they encounter. We expect them to work together on problems, finding unique solutions as a team.
Our recent Thinking Big week encouraged each age group to tackle a sustainability challenge, creating eco-cars for the future, building their own robots and using junk and loose parts to think creatively about how they’d plan, build and make their creations. The week ended with Get Messy day, a chance to let loose and let the creativity run free!
Being part of a global schools group gives us unrivalled access to the latest Ed-Tech developments. During the pandemic, we were commended on the strength of online teaching for even our youngest pupils, using Seesaw and Google Meets to deliver a programme of activities throughout the day.
Our little people are true digital natives, so we nurture this safely and in an age-appropriate way, through gamified learning apps, encouraging children to feedback work to teachers using a variety of presentation formats. We are currently developing a partnership with Lego and have taken part in the First Lego League Challenge, through the Institute of Engineering.
All Little Downsend children learn to code, using beebots or programmable robots, as well as having access to their own iPad and best-in-class ed-tech apps. In March 2022, Little Downsend was delighted to be invited by Microsoft to join the Incubator Pathway of the Showcase Schools Programme.
Our latest initiative is ensuring all staff at Little Downsend take part in the 21st Century Learning Design training programme. This Microsoft learning path provides our team with the tools to transform how they design enriching learning experiences for every age group.
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