Families groups

Find out why we use vertical families to encourage growth mindset, mixed aged groups and a caring community.

Written by Josh Rutledge.

One of our focuses in primary this year was to provide children with the opportunity of working collaboratively, not only within their given year groups but across the whole of primary. In order for this to happen, we have created four vertical family groups so that children can take part in extra-curricular learning opportunities linked to Christmas, Halloween, carnival, school council, reading competitions, creative art projects, playground monitoring and much more.

This has proven a great hit; children are motivated and excited by family points and coming together as a group of friends that´s different from their class. Children are awarded family points across the week for various achievements; showing kindness to others and our environment, being helpful or making a fantastic effort in class.

At the end of the week, our Year 6 prefects collect and total all of the family points across Primary and early years together and the winning family is announced during our Friday celebration assembly, they are awarded a cup with a ribbon representing their family which is displayed throughout school.

Although there is a sense of competition through collecting family points, we strongly believe that our new system makes children cooperative rather than competitive. Our weekly family paired reading, family maths and art activities highlights this.

Our children not only care about their achievements and learning journey, but they also care about their peers'; the younger ones especially love being around the older children.

We have found it has been really positive to have mixed aged groups working together, that can mentor, look up to and inspire one another.

It makes for one BIG happy family at the Olive tree!