Arbourthorne Community Primary School
Communicating core values
Arbourthorne Community Primary School’s headteacher asked me to produce some innovative, fun ideas to help introduce new ‘core values’ to the school. They wanted a range of creative solutions to effectively convey a consistent message (the school’s eight core values) to four different audiences (pupils, parents, governors and staff) – all with different needs and preconceptions.
I worked closely with interior designer – Yvonne Thurley (qbed) – on this project to ensure the message was consistent and easily understood throughout the school. Yvonne redesigned the reception area to include a colourful installation highlighting the new values so that everyone entering the school is immediately aware of the school’s core values.
I devised a fun, interactive star cube to engage the pupils with the school’s new values. The inventive design is based around star shapes, which slot together to form a cube (echoing the star in the new logo I designed for the school). It is provided flat for easy storage. It can be played with in a number of ways: it is reversible (it can be assembled either way round) and multiple cubes can be slotted together to stack them up. They can be used to keep things in or can be divided into halves and quarters by inserting the co-ordinating star shapes inside them. A teaching sheet was produced alongside this with ideas of how the cube can be integrated into maths and science lessons as a fun teaching aid to integrate the core values into everyday lessons.
I designed a set of 16 posters to be displayed on each classroom wall showing the related phrases behind each core value. The school also ordered some fuzzy bugs with the values printed on the bug tags to give to the children.
To connect with the parents, I designed a “You are a star” postcard to be sent out when their child has demonstrated one of the core values particularly well. Some of the parents who received these became very emotional as they were so proud of their children and finally understood what the school was trying to do. These postcards proved so popular with the children, parents and staff that the school commissioned four new postcard designs the following year to build a strong home-school connection.
The postcards have had a huge impact on our school. They support us in connecting with our parents by sending them something personalised about their child’s achievements. Some parents get very emotional that their child has been spotted. The children love getting the postcards as it makes them feel really special. The postcards keep motivation high and we have new ones designed every year to keep the focus on our development priorities and to keep them exciting and fresh. The home- school connection was highly praised during our recent inspection.