Beresford Memorial Church of England First School, SCARF school since 2018, 34.90% free school meals, Staffordshire
“The resources are excellent, not just for the individual lessons but for the planning, overview and policies.”
Teachers and teaching assistants at Beresford Memorial Church of England First School have been using SCARF since August 2018. We spoke to Lorna Housley-Tatton, head of PSHE, about the benefits and impact SCARF has had on her pupils and staff.
Benefits of SCARF
Teachers at Beresford Memorial CE First School use SCARF from nursery through to Year 4. Lorna Housley-Tatton, head of PSHE at the school, says that one of the key reasons they chose SCARF is because of the excellent resources and that it meets all of the DfE requirements. When Lorna was writing the PSHE policy and liaising with parents, she says there was plenty of information for her to utilise.
“The resources are excellent, not just for the individual lessons but for the planning, overview and policies.” Lorna goes on to say “What we like as a school is that it’s very age-appropriate. You can see the progression through the school of the key themes, it’s not just a repetition of the same work.”
The flexibility of SCARF has been really useful in meeting the needs of the pupils, as well as the school curriculum and timetable. As Lorna explains, “I’ve got an overview where we use your lessons for the whole school and then we might do individual things like Hello Yellow Day or Children’s Mental Health Week, where we slot in SCARF lessons.”
Furthermore, our SCARF Subjects & Issues tool has been particularly helpful for individual lessons and being reactive, as Lorna adds“Where there’s been a class experiencing friendship issues or shouting out, it’s been nice to do those lessons with the whole class and drop those lessons in where necessary.”
SCARF impact on pupils and staff
When we asked Lorna “What has the impact of SCARF been on pupils and teachers?” she replied “It’s been huge for us at school, absolutely huge.” For the past couple of years, the school has taken part in Wear your Scarf to School Day - where we celebrate our SCARF values of Safety, Caring, Achievement, Resilience and Friendship.
She tells us that the children have noticed the overlap with the SCARF values and the school's Christian values. “Being a church school, a lot of those things are covered in our Christian values, there is an overlap there and the children will join the dots up and say ‘We’ve learned something similar in worship’.”
There’s also been a positive impact on the teachers as Lorna explains “It’s easy for teaching assistants to download and prepare the resources, everything’s there for them, I think that’s worked really well.”
Additionally, the staff also use Insights to record their assessments and marks. Lorna tells us that SCARF has really helped raise the profile of PSHE within the school. “We have the whole-school, the individual group and then the children’s individual assessment there as well. We use the name of the SCARF units to record it, which also goes into personal development, church topics and mental health topics.” Each year also has floor books filled with post-it notes, photos and comments from the children on their SCARF lessons.
Final words
When asked if she would recommend SCARF to other schools, Lorna told us. “Absolutely, definitely. It (SCARF) has transformed the status of the subject. It’s really brought it to the forefront and helped the teaching staff and children. It’s helped give PSHE equal weighting to the other academic subjects.”
