The Windley School learning vision is

"SET for life at Windley School"

and the SET means, 'Socially skilled',

'Effective communicators', and 'Thinking learners'.

All our planning in the school

has to be related straight back to that vision.

If it’s not linked to the vision,

then it’s not something that we need to do.

Implicit in that planning, and the

implementation of the planning, are the key competencies.

The students need to be developing and using

those key competencies to ensure that

they are meeting our school vision.

So in our school we have the

"SET for life" as our learning vision

and we have broken it down into

into the three areas of 'socially skilled',

'effective communicators', and 'thinking learners'.

So we have stuck with ‘resilience’

and the children need to be,

in terms of 'social skilled', resilient, and

they will work through examples of that.

In 'adventures for learning' they will actually do

the modelling of what it means to be resilient,

and they will use the language of resilience

so that the children can then recognise

when they are developing those skills.

One of the other key things for us

in our 'socially skilled' aspect of our "SET for life"

is the collaboration and the need

for the children be able to learn to work together

peacefully, calmly, and to an end that creates

a real sense of success for them, working together.

The second part of our "SET for life" vision

that they work with in 'adventures for learning'

is the 'effective communicators'.

It’s one of the key areas for us with

our children in terms of the 'adventures for learning',

the oral language, and the aspect of it

that they focus on.

The third area is the 'thinking learners',

so it’s the creative, critical, and caring learners

and thinkers; so they've got to able to

learn to think in those three areas:

to be creative, to be critical, and to be caring.

They focus very heavily on making sure

the competencies are the key to

driving the way in which the children learn

and they refer frequently to,

"How is that making you a better learner?",

"How is that making you self-managing?"

And the children are able to verbalise

those sorts of concepts as they come through.

The concept of developing the students into

socially skilled, effective communicators,

and thinking learners is paramount in

the planning and decision making that

they have around the sorts of learning that

going to on at any particular time in the afternoon sessions.

So it fits very comfortably into the wider school vision,

and also fits comfortably into the process of

inquiry learning which is being developed

further up the school, and it is the precursor,

in our opinion, to the children’s ability

to move comfortably into the senior school and

into, perhaps, a more academic aspect of inquiry learning.

But also they are the foundation skills

for when they move further through the school.

Examples of that are the fact that I

recently was relieving in one of the year 3 and 4 classes,

and they were beginning the questioning process

for an inquiry unit that they were about to establish.

And the richness of the questions that came

particularly from the year 3 students,

who have had 'adventures in learning'

as part of their programme in the junior school,

was very, very evident. And so

they are setting those very strong foundations

there for the whole development of inquiry,

which again uses the key competencies as

a foundation for the learning.