Surrey Square Primary School

‘Personal and academic excellence; everyone, every day.’

Surrey Square is a special place. Serving a community where 100% of families are from the lowest Icadi deprivation bands, we ensure our pupils make exceptional progress. But progress in what? And how?

As schools, we are judged on a very important, but very narrow, set of academic outcomes. Children unarguably need to leave primary school with a high level of written English, the ability to read fluently and calculate and problem solve effectively. Our Key Stage 2 results have been consistently significantly above the national average over many years and are testament to our commitment to ‘academic excellence’. However, that is not all they need, and so we enter the world of debate around ‘character’, ‘soft skills’, ‘meta-congnition’ and ‘behaviour for learning’. Call it what you will, it is selfevident that our pupils need other types of learning to support them on their academic journey; what we call ‘personal excellence’.