Rockwood works hard to engage the children and families with the local community. This includes working with other local schools, services and facilities, and also encouraging the children to value and respect the local environment and in particular Towneley Park, which is opposite the school. Rockwood Nursery School is fully committed to the Race Relations Act and as such achieved the Lancashire Race Equality Mark in 2012.
Lancashire Race Equality Policy
School Legal Requirements
The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 places specific duties on schools in terms of promoting good race relations and this has been statutory for all schools since May 2001.
Under the legislation schools, along with all other public institutions, have a positive duty to:
- Eliminate discrimination
- Promote equality of opportunity
- Promote good relations between persons of different racial groups
Specifically, schools need to have a Race Equality policy in place with arrangements for its implementation, along with arrangements for monitoring and assessing the impact of the policy on staff, pupils and parents.
Little Me Project and Awards
As part of our Community Cohesion work and Race Equality Mark we are engaged in projects with four other local Nursery Schools.
This has included projects such as the Little Me project for which we have been awarded a Learning Excellence Award 2014: Innovation Award for this project and a Creativity bid for our Stories Alive! project to support work with families between these nursery schools and to engage in Personal, Social and Emotional Development and Communication, Language and Literacy activities. The Burnley cluster of nursery schools have now successfully bid for support to improve the knowledge and creative teaching of Mathematics through engagement with the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM).
Little Me's
As part of our welcoming process, each child is given a wooden 'Little Me' figure, a small version of themselves. We ask families to dress and play with the figure so that it becomes part of the family. With the figure is also a book. We encourage all families to record things that they do at home with the Little Me - trips out, games they play, holidays, etc by writing and/or putting pictures in the book. When these are brought into school, the Keyperson uses these to share in their group time and to plan additional activities for the children.
Creative Project
In 2013, we successfully bid with the four other partner nursery schools, for a Creativity project. The aim of the project was to raise the attainment in the People and Communities strand for Understanding the World area of the curriculum through engaging children and parents in creative activities. This involved a special puppet show of "The Mystery of the Sock Snatcher" and involving parents in helping their children make sock puppets. It focussed on supporting parental engagement with children's learning, and in particular, provided parent/carer training for those with children who had speech and language difficulties. Joint parent/carer and staff training was provided to provide speech and language activities in February 2014.
