Living out our Vision

Forest School

Holistic Development: Support a child's overall well-being—covering emotional resilience, social communication, physical coordination, and cognitive curiosity.

Child-Led Learning: Shift the focus from direct adult instruction to a learner-centred model where participants explore their own interests, make choices, and solve problems.

Confidence & Self-Esteem: Build independence and self-worth through hands-on tasks and mastery of new outdoor skills.

Supported Risk-Taking: Provide a safe framework where learners can manage appropriate, assessed risks (such as using tools or building fires) and learn from natural consequences.

Connection to Nature: Cultivate a lifelong respect, appreciation, and sense of stewardship for the environment and changing seasons.

Sport and PE 

Sport plays an important part of what we do here at Wiggonby. The importance and coverage of PE and sport continues to grow and we are proud of our Platinum School Games Mark, which is fantastic recognition of the high-quality provision on offer.

Residentials

Our pupils are fortunate to be given the opportunity of attending and experiencing three outstanding residentials in their final years at Wiggonby. Running on a 3-year cycle, pupils can visit two capital cities, and one outward bound centre. In the last three years, we have taken our pupils to London, Edinburgh, and Barcaple Outward Outdoor Centre. We will be returning to London in 2027.

Our city residentials promote cultural capital. As a small rural Cumbrian school, it is vitally important for our pupils to experience life in a large city. Our residentials are fun and full of amazing activities for our pupils and staff to enjoy. At Barcaple, pupils are challenged to go outside of their comfort zone and to set themselves their own targets to achieve. Together, we support each other, sharing in our school vision of 'With Grace and Love We Dream and Achieve.'

London 2024

Edinburgh 2025

Barcaple 2026

Church Services

We are thankful for our close partnership with St. Andrew's Church, Aikton. Each year, we enjoy holding services at St. Andrew's for Christmas, Easter and Ascension Day. Our services are always very well attended by our parents, grandparents and other family members. This gathering together plays an important role in us celebrating God's love as a school family.

Our Year 6 pupils also attend the annual Leavers' Service at Carlisle Cathedral.

Harvest Festival

Each year, we hold our Harvest Festival in the school hall. Our pupils share their learning around a particular theme through poetry, artwork, readings, and prayer. We enjoy adding a few hymns to our celebration of thanks for all of the wonderful food produced.

Following the festival, we hold an auction of goods that have been donated to school from our fantastic Wiggonby families. Money raised is split between the Bishop of Carlisle's Harvest Appeal and Wigton Foodbank. We take some of our oldest and youngest pupils to the Foodbank to deliver our collection of non-perishable foods, and then visit the local supermarket to buy a range of important items suggested by the Foodbank.

All of this inspires our pupils to want to help others within our community and beyond, again demonstrating our core values contained within our vision.

RE Days

Each term, we plan and deliver a whole-school RE Day, full of learning about an aspect of the bible. Our pupils join together in their House groups and support each other in completing a range of activities that will then be shared during our Community Worship at the end of the day. A special day because we have pupils of all ages working together, demonstrating our vision perfectly.

Experience Days

At Wiggonby C of E Primary School, we love providing our pupils and staff with a range of experiences, both in and out of school. Over the past few years we have had wheelchair basketball, annual book days, Times Tables Rockstars Day, Wellbeing Days, and even a Back to the Future Day!

All of these experiences promote a real sense of awe and wonder, building on our fantastic curriculum opportunities each week. Our pupils grow in confidence orally, being able to ask some really big questions that help them learn and flourish at Wiggonby.

Wellbeing

The wellbeing of pupils and staff is very important to us. Forest School is a big part of that, but we also do lots of other things across the year in order to promote wellbeing.

We have also supported Give A Day, by making up plant pots, writing a positive message, and delivering these to local residents within our village - Pots of Joy.

Wiggonby Art Gallery

For our Spring Term parent meetings, we create a fantastic art gallery, showcasing the pupils' work that has been done during that term. Pupils feel a sense of pride in having their art work displayed in such a way and being able to talk to their parents about what they have created.

We have even taken our art club to Carlisle to walk the city's graffiti trail. A real awe and wonder moment.

World Book Day

We love celebrating World Book Day at Wiggonby! The promotion of developing a love for reading is something we take great pride in. During WBD, pupils take part in a range of activities all centred around reading. Last year, our older pupils worked with the younger pupils to write and illustrate their own books! AMAZING! Then they got to read their own books to other children. What a great experience!

Gardening and Cumbria in Bloom

As you will have seen elsewhere on the website, we have become celebrated gardeners. From the inception of our wonderful gardening club, we have been entering the annual Cumbria in Bloom Awards. In 2024, we were even crowned Cumbria in Bloom winners! Go Wiggonby! Our pupils take great pride in seeing their plants and vegetables grow, and it is lovely to see their confidence when speaking to the judges. We are entering Cumbria in Bloom again this academic year.

Music

It is an absolute joy to see the development of our music provision continue to grow and inspire more and more pupils to pick up an instrument. We have provided our pupils with whole-class tuition in various instruments, and now have an established orchestra and music ensemble. 

Our violinists have represented Wiggonby at the Carlisle Music Festival and have taken part in several Community Strings events, held at the Keswick Pencil Museum. Here, our violinist form part of a huge orchestra of pupils from other schools around Cumbria, supported by music teachers and adults from Cumbria Music Hub. Such a pleasure to be a part of and to see our vision being lived out.

TTRS & Back to the Future Day

All of our pupils have access to Times Tables Rockstars (Numbots for our younger pupils) to play at home, but also in school. The aim? To improve their knowledge of number and their times tables. We have school competitions and leaderboards, and on TTRS Day, we morphed into absolute rockstars and battled our way through a number of engaging activities aimed at improving our number skills.

One of Mr Brooks' favourite movies of all time is 'Back to the Future'. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its release, we organised a day of exploring the future. We wrote to our future selves, made a time machine and thought about what inventions there might be in the future. Awe and wonder in action, fulfilling our whole-school vision too.

Bright Stars Competition

Last year, our Year 5 and 6 pupils took part in Bright Stars, a young enterprise competition. With the support of Orian, our team of entrepreneurs sought to create a company that would make an interesting product that could be sold for profit. Over the course of 8 weeks, pupils designed and made their own bookmarks, before branching out to fruit smoothies. Centred around wellbeing, the company name became known as 'WOW!', which stands for Wiggonby on Wellbeing. We were also fortunate to be visited by local media entreprneur, Adam Roberts, who took the time to talk to the team about podcasts and marketing - very inspiring.

The team nominated Carlisle MIND as their chosen charity. They were thrilled to have made over £1000 in profit and winning the award for best logo. A great achievement, I am sure you will agree.

Careers Initiative

Our older pupils attend an annual careers fair each year, organised within our cluster of schools. Here, pupils can learn more about careers in Cumbria, as well as further afield. 

Class 3 have also had visits from William Hare, a structural engineering firm, and have also had several Business Breakfasts, where people with different job roles within William Hare have talked to the children about their job. Pupils have then been able to ask a range of questions.

Curriculum Experiences

To support our learning, we always try to get outside the classroom as often as we can. For example, in geography, pupils were learning about rivers, so we worked with the Blencathra Field Studies Centre to do some field work near Threlkeld. 

In history, one class had been learning about the Maya civilisation. We were able to invite an actual archaeologist to school, who has done a lot of work in Central America, to share her knowledge and expertise about the Mayans. How inspiring is that?

Our youngest pupils were learning about animals and their habitats, so had the opportunity to meet and handle some real animals. Very brave!

We have also celebrated National Science Week with an explosive introduction to the week, and we even took the whole school to Beamish for a day of learning about our past.

You will also see that Shakespeare is very much enjoyed here at Wiggonby. We bring our reading to life by having an outstanding workshop, full of action and dressing up!