Wincheap Foundation Primary School

Headteacher's Welcome

It is a pleasure to welcome you to our school!

Thank you for taking the time to look at our website.  I hope that it will give you some idea of what life is like at Wincheap Foundation Primary School and the fantastic opportunities that we offer our children.

Our mission statement, ‘Celebrating individuality, enabling every child to flourish and reach their full potential', reflects our aims of nurturing each child’s talents and abilities, giving them opportunities to be happy, resilient and enthusiastic learners and enabling them to make good or better progress across all areas of the curriculum.

At Wincheap, we strive to provide all our children with a rich, varied and exciting curriculum with a broad range of stimulating learning experiences.    We particularly value the arts and are proud to have held Artsmark Gold for many years in recognition of our achievements in this area.  We enjoy regularly inviting parents into school to celebrate their children’s successes through productions, class assemblies and ‘showcase’ opportunities to share learning, and events such as Festival on the Field.  All of our children in all classes benefit from outdoor learning in our fabulous, well-established forest school taught by a full-time specialist teacher and set within our extensive school grounds. 

We pride ourselves on the inclusive nature of the school and are especially proud of our status as a school with a Specialist Resource Provision with places for 20 children with speech, language and communication difficulties in our Speech and Language Department.  We are a welcoming school and we value working in partnership with parents.  We are always pleased to welcome parents into the school and to work together to develop our children’s learning.

I feel privileged to be the headteacher of such an amazing school where a dedicated and talented team of staff and governors work with inspiring children in an atmosphere of mutual respect.  The fact that our reception classes have been massively oversubscribed in recent years speaks for itself.  Please take a look on this website at our rich and engaging curriculum as well as our latest Ofsted report which confirm that Wincheap is a fantastic school at the heart of our local community.  Please contact us or come and visit if you would like to find out more.  I would be delighted to show you round our wonderful school.

Best wishes,

Nicola Dawson

Headteacher

Term Dates 2025 / 2026

Term 1:

Wednesday 3^rd September 2025 – Friday 17^th October 2025

Staff Training Day: Monday 1st September 2025 - no children in school

Staff Training Day: Tuesday 2nd September 2025 - no children in school

Term 2:

Tuesday 28^th October 2025 – 19^th December 2025

Staff Training Day: Monday 27^th October 2025 - no children in school

Term 3:

Monday 5^th January 2026 – Thursday 12^th February 2026

Staff Training Day: Friday 13^th February 2026 - no children in school

Term 4:

Monday 23^rd February 2026 – Thursday 2^nd April 2026

Bank Holiday: Friday 3^rd April 2026 (Good Friday)

Term 5:

Monday 20^th April 2026 – Friday 22^nd May 2026

Term 6:

Tuesday 2^nd June 2026 – Tuesday 21^st July 2026

Staff Training Day:  Monday 1^st June 2026 - no children in school

Forest School

At Wincheap we believe in nurturing and developing the whole child. We want them to achieve their potential academically but we also recognise the equal importance for personal growth (socially, emotionally and physically).

Forest school provides children with a space in their weekly timetable where they can apply their current understanding of curriculum topics and develop new knowledge and skills through experiencing the outdoors.

Forest school activities are based on collaborative working, fostering teamwork on a regular basis, they encourage children to problem solve creatively using the tools and resources of the outdoors. It’s a space where they don’t have to worry about the ‘right’ outcome but instead focus on the process and share better ways of working.

Forest school enables children to take risks by getting them to evaluate the possible dangers and finding solutions to stay safe.

We also feel experiencing the outdoors give space to a technologically saturated culture – helping them to appreciate the wildlife and hopefully realising their responsibility in looking after it for their future generations.

We believe that regular opportunities outdoors promotes positive mental health for our children and therefore happier learners.

And a large part of Forest school is fun!