UNICEF Gold Rights Respecting Schools Award

Our assessors praised our children's articulate knowledge and understanding of rights and the way our whole community lives these values daily.

British Values— democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance — are not a display on a corridor wall at Kells Lane. They are practised daily through our Smart School Council Class Meetings, our Kells Lane Cabinet, our places of worship visits, and our six-week Culture curriculum theme. Our Citizenship curriculum builds on this further, helping children understand their role in society and — crucially — that they have a voice within it.

We also take economic wellbeing seriously. Children develop age-appropriate financial literacy so they leave primary school equipped to make informed, confident decisions. And our Pupil Premium strategy ensures every child — regardless of background — can access the same rich experiences as their peers. Disadvantage is never a barrier to remarkable at Kells Lane.

Rights Respecting School

Citizenship Curriculum

Pupil Premium

Smart School Council — Every Child's Voice, Every Week

The Smart School Council principle is simple: every child's voice matters — not just the most confident few.

Every class. Every child. Every week. Our pupil-led Class Meetings give every child a real voice in how our school is run — and our Communication Team makes sure that voice is heard and acted on.

Our approach has been featured by Smart School Councils as an example of best practice, and our children are visibly proud of the democratic culture they help to shape. This is pupil voice as a lived experience — not a display board exercise — and it connects directly to our Rights Respecting ethos, our TGMC emotional literacy work, and the value of Be Empowered. Our children don't just learn about democracy. They practise it every single week.

Most distinctively, we have the Kells Lane Cabinet — our own model of pupil leadership structured around the idea that children should have real influence over the direction and decisions of their school. The Cabinet gives Year 6 pupils a formal, prestigious leadership role that mirrors real-world democratic and civic structures, and connects directly to the values of our Smart School Council, our Rights Respecting ethos, and our commitment to Be Empowered. You can read more about our current Cabinet members and their roles below.

We believe that the children who leave Kells Lane having held these roles carry something with them that cannot be taught from a textbook — the knowledge, earned through experience, that they are capable of leading, serving, and making a real difference. That is what Find Your Remarkable looks like in Year 6.

Citizenship Curriculum

How we transformed our school council to improve communication and inclusion

We are a TGMC School- Behaviour and Regulation

TGMC, or ‘The Good Morning Club’, is an approach that uses building connections, positive psychology, and emotional regulation to create calmer, more positive, more purposeful, more engaged learning environments.

Behaviour and Attitudes

We are an emotionally literate school where pupils develop the skills of self-regulation and learning from mistakes by repairing and reflecting. We foster a sense of belonging and acceptance, so children grow to become honest, responsible citizens of their community.

Also, our staff have been trained directly by Paul Dix — author of When the Adults Change, Everything Changes — in his Positive Noticing approach. Rather than focusing on correction, we focus on connection: catching children doing the right thing, naming it, and building a culture of trust and belonging.

TGMC- What is it? Information for parents and carers

TGMC Parental Portal

Paul Dix: When The Parents Change

Whole-School Wellbeing

The THRIVE Approach is a whole-school framework for supporting children's social and emotional development, creating calm and nurturing environments that help pupils engage positively with their learning.

At Kells Lane, it is embedded across the whole school — not just for children who are struggling, but for every child, every day. Rooted in established neuroscience, THRIVE helps adults understand the links between emotional growth and learning, and develop a trauma-sensitive, attachment-informed approach to supporting children's social and emotional health. Our trained THRIVE practitioners use it to identify needs early, build resilience, and ensure that every child feels safe, regulated, and ready to learn — because we know that a child who feels secure is a child who can find their remarkable.

Special Educational Needs & Inclusion

THRIVE

Rooted in Place — Our Building, Our Story, Our Community

There is something special about walking into a Victorian school building. Ours has been at the heart of Low Fell for over a century — and that sense of place, of permanence, of belonging to something bigger than yourself, is something our children feel from their very first day. We are enormously proud of where we are and what this building represents.

We believe that knowing where you come from helps you understand who you are. That is why we work with local historians to bring the story of Low Fell and Gateshead alive for our children — connecting them to their community in ways that make history feel genuinely personal rather than distant. This work has earned us the Heritage History Award— Historic England.

One story above all others captures the spirit we want our children to carry with them. Sir Joseph Swan — inventor of the world's first practical incandescent light bulb — lived at Underhill on Kells Lane North, just streets from our school. His house was the first in England to be wired for domestic electric lighting. He changed the world, from the end of our road.

We use Joseph Swan's story not as a history lesson, but as a mirror. We hold it up and say to every child: this is what remarkable looks like. It starts with curiosity. It grows through determination. And it can happen anywhere — even here, even you. Swan is the most local, most vivid proof we have that Find Your Remarkable is not just a school motto. It is a fact.

We are proud to have original artwork by Charlie Rogers — the beloved Gateshead artist — displayed in our school. He painted Kells Lane itself, and our children visit Saltwell Park, one of his favourite subjects, seeing their local world through an artist's eyes.

History Curriculum

Active Environmental Citizens — Not Just Learners

At Kells Lane, climate education is not something children read about and move on from. It is something they act on. We partner with Groundwork North East on real environmental projects, and our children have taken part in hands-on tree planting — physically putting roots in the ground and understanding exactly why it matters. We are also part of SchoolCycled, building genuine understanding of recycling, materials, and circular thinking in practical, memorable ways

Our Eco School Award recognise this commitment — but the real measure is children who leave us genuinely caring about the world they are inheriting, and believing they have the power to do something about it. You can follow all of this work in our school newsletters.

This is Be Empowered and Be Ambitious in their most urgent form — because the generation sitting in our classrooms right now will shape the future of this planet. We take that seriously.

Climate Education & Sustainability

Newsletters

Sporting Excellence

The Gold level is only awarded to schools that demonstrate outstanding engagement, leadership, and delivery of a wide range of sporting opportunities. At Kells Lane, this means competitive sport, inclusive physical activity, and extracurricular opportunities that are genuinely open to every child — not just the most talented.

The criteria spans participation, competition, workforce, and community — and we are proud that our commitment to sport at every level of ability has been recognised at the highest standard. Because physical confidence, teamwork, and resilience on a sports field are not separate from our school values — they are an expression of them.

Physical Education Curriculum

Our Enrichment Offer

Music Mark of Recognition

The Music Mark of Recognition celebrates schools that demonstrate a genuine commitment to improving music education and recognise the value of music as part of a broad and balanced curriculum. To achieve it, a school must provide evidence of a clear strategy for music that supports all pupils — not just those who are already able or already engaged.

At Kells Lane, we believe music is not a privilege or an extra. It is part of what it means to be a whole, creative, expressive human being — and every child in our school deserves access to it. The Music Mark of Recognition represents a true exchange of aspiration, support, and improvement, with the core motivation being the musical lives of children and the quality of their music education.

We are proud that our commitment to music for every child has been formally recognised — because finding your remarkable sometimes starts with a song.

Music Curriculum

Music Mark of Recognition for Ambition and Quality

Our Enrichment Offer

Healthy Schools Status

An external validator spent the day with us, speaking with children, staff, and leaders, touring the school, and looking closely at everything we do across four areas: healthy eating, physical activity, PSHE, and children's social and emotional wellbeing.

He described our school as "an exciting yet emotionally supportive learning environment" — one where the ethos of nurture and high expectations is visible in everything, from the way our classrooms feel to the way our staff speak to children. He praised the quality of our curriculum, the range of opportunities we give children to lead and take responsibility, and — most importantly — the children themselves, who he described as articulate, thoughtful, and confident.

A group of our pupils showed him around the school. He wrote that they "were a credit to themselves, the school, and their families."

Our staff told him they feel valued, trusted, and proud to work here. And our children told him: "I've got friends in other schools who don't have the chance to do all the things we do."

That says it all.

This award recognises what our whole community works hard to build every single day — a school where every child feels safe, healthy, and ready to find their remarkable.

Healthy Schools Report

Healthy Schools Certificate

Water Smart School - Royal Life Saving Society

This is the highest level of the Water Smart Schools programme — a rigorous, whole-school accreditation that requires us to teach water safety knowledge across every year group, take children on real-world water field trips, involve parents and the wider community, and embed a sustained commitment to keeping children safe in and around water. Drowning is one of the leading causes of child trauma-related deaths in the UK, and this award reflects our belief that every child — regardless of background — deserves the knowledge and skills to stay safe for life.

Water Smart Certificate Gold Kells Lane

Teaching Grounded in Evidence

What Does it Mean to Be a Trauma Informed School?

At Kells Lane, we understand that some children carry experiences into school that can affect how they feel, how they behave, and how ready they are to learn. Being a trauma informed school means that every member of our staff are trained to understand how adverse childhood experiences can affect a child's developing brain and nervous system, and to respond with knowledge, compassion, and calm rather than judgement or punishment.

A trauma informed approach asks a fundamentally different question. Instead of "what is wrong with this child?" we ask "what has this child experienced, and what do they need from us right now?"

This shifts everything — the way we speak to children, the way we manage difficult moments, the way we build relationships day by day. Our Healthy Schools external validator noted that at Kells Lane, children's changing social and emotional needs are consistently "managed and responded to with dignity and compassion, with an awareness that behaviour is communicating need."

Trauma Informed School

THRIVE

Healthy School Report

Pupil Book Study- Evaluating our Curriculum

Our teachers ground every approach in high-quality evidence, combining the best of current thinking with deep professional expertise about our own children and community.

One example of this in action: our staff are trained in Pupil Book Study, the method developed by curriculum expert Alex Bedford. Rather than simply checking that work is being done, Pupil Book Study is a rigorous, structured way of listening to pupil voice to evaluate the quality of our curriculum and the genuine impact of teaching on learning — not just what children produce, but what they actually understand and remember.

This means decisions about how and what we teach are shaped by real evidence from our own children, not guesswork. Your child benefits from teaching that is constantly refined, honestly evaluated, and genuinely responsive. This is what Be Curious looks like for the adults in the room.

The Foundations of Pupil Book Study

Evidence Informed Practice