Prospectus and Admissions
Our Curriculum Intent at St. Andrews
St Andrew’s provides a clearly structured, progressive curriculum through which our children gain the knowledge, skills, vocabulary and experiences required to embrace their future ambitions. Our curriculum is taught to be remembered with a focus on small-steps and ongoing retrieval based practise across all subjects. We aim to deliver well-informed, focused and specific curriculum content, enabling our children to understand and access the world around them. The values of our school: ready, respectful and safe, underpin all that we do in providing an inclusive, nurturing and ambitious learning environment whereby every child is supported to succeed.
Our key aims:
- To enable all children to access and be challenged by our curriculum
- To create a school environment which is led by our values
- To build our children’s cultural capital across all subjects
- To make children aware of their future opportunities
- To ensure all of our children have the opportunity to develop key life skills
Admissions Information
The full document relating to admission is available on request; it contains details of admission to all Cambridgeshire schools. We have, therefore, written a report to include all the details relating to our Primary school.
Pre-school
We are very fortunate at St Andrew's to have a Nursery as part of our school, and so Pre-school to us means playgroup and any of the other early years’ community groups, which occur within in the village or in the extended school facilities at the Primary schools. If you are interested in your child attending playgroup the contact details are as follows: Windmills playgroup - phone number 07549 161864. This group is managed by Angie Clarke and a group of dedicated staff. They will be able to tell you their admission policy and the details of the days they work and where and when they hold their sessions.
Nursery Children are eligible to start Nursery the September after their 3rd birthday. The County policy gives flexibility for admitting children three times a year. Once the children have had their birthday they are eligible for 15 free funded hours, rising to 30 hours depending on personal circumstances and eligibility. The criteria followed for admission is the same as that used by the County for school admission. Please see the following section detailing procedure for school admission. The deadline for Nursery applications is usually around the end of March, we operate on a 1st come, 1st served method. Families can register for Nursery at any time leading up to this deadline; a form is available from the school office to express an interest in attending school. These are kept on file in the office until after the deadline has passed and then the admission process begins. The first contact is a letter, to those on our records, asking if a Nursery place is still required. From the replies to this letter our September Nursery is formed. Once registered please keep the school informed of any change to your address to ensure you receive all the letters correctly. There is plenty of opportunity to meet with the staff e.g. visits and meetings in school and home visits.
If you do not live in our catchment area, but would like your child to attend St Andrew’s, our recommendation is that you register for Nursery at the school of preference and your catchment school. If you are offered two places you are at liberty to choose which one you would prefer. However, if your preferred school is full and unable to offer a place, you would miss out on Nursery education if you had not followed the guide lines above. We consider the sessions taken as half days in Nursery and the whole year in Reception as a very important part of our children’s education. These two years together form the Foundation Education, which is monitored, assessed and recorded in order to provide a firm basis for the next step which is to continue into Key stage 1 and then follow on in to Key stage 2.
Cambridgeshire County Admission Criteria
The rules for admission to school are very specific. The admission for Nursery is organised by the school and all other admission is organised by the Admissions team in Cambridgeshire County Council. They control the admission for every school in the County and communicate with us, allocating places as people move into the area and people leave the school. The rules for allocating places to schools can be found on the links below.
Cambridgeshire County Council Admissions Page