Surrey Square, the school education policy forgot

Ask most people what they know about the Old Kent Road and they’ll probably tell you it’s the cheapest property on the Monopoly board.

But nestled among the area’s vast council estates in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country is Surrey Square Primary School.

Over the past two decades, as ministers have steered schools towards knowledge-rich curriculums and strict behaviour policies, this school has been quietly breaking the mould.

And as Labour shifts the agenda, Surrey Square is no longer a school that education policy forgot. It’s a trailblazer for many of the government’s new ideas.

Trainers allowed and ‘no rules’

“What does the Monopoly board tell you about this area?” associate head Nicola Noble asks me when I visit the school. “It tells you it’s the cheap square, the brown square, the square that nobody wants. So culturally, it’s endemic within our society that this area is written off.

“What we want [the children] to do is to really thrive and step into their light. Show the world the incredible human beings they are and change that square on the Monopoly board, change the narrative around it.”

The moment you arrive on site, the school feels different.

Pupils can wear trainers and pick the colour of the T-shirt they wear under their optional branded SSQ jumpers.

Noble says there are “no rules”. Instead, she says “we teach the values and we teach them from the child’s starting point and without judgment. If a child comes to school and they find it difficult to show compassion, we teach them.”

‘Behaviour is information’

Surrey Square hasn’t permanently excluded a pupil in almost two decades. The school sees behaviour “as information”, Noble says.

“If a child is behaving in a challenging way for us, [we need] to understand what they’re trying to communicate to us, whether that be something that’s going on at home, or a learning need or something else.”

These values sit at the core of a large wheel graphic that depicts the school’s ethos, alongside skills (maths, reading, writing and oracy), relationships and wellbeing.

“We talk about relationships being the precondition to any meaningful work. So we support people in how to develop, maintain, deepen and repair those relationships, because again, we believe that provides the foundation that’s needed.”

Pupils ‘can’t lose their joy time’

Another difference in the school’s approach is how it preserves “joy time” for pupils.

Other schools might do “golden time”, which you can earn or lose. But Noble says “joy time for us is part of the curriculum”.

“It’s fundamentally about children connecting with each other and with the adults, and about playing. You can’t lose your maths lesson. So, you definitely can’t lose your joy time. It’s a right for everybody.

“And we would also say that children displaying some more challenging behaviours probably need joy time the most.”

Such language and approaches are often dismissed as coming at the expense of academic rigour and discipline.

But Surrey Square’s progress scores are above average. Ofsted confirmed in 2022 the school remained ‘outstanding’, lavishing it with praise for putting wellbeing and mental health “at the centre of the curriculum”.

Last year, it also won the coveted primary school of the year at the National Teaching Awards

Pupils’ behaviour in lessons and around the school is also “exemplary”, the report added.

Inspectors also praised the school for adapting subjects “so they are more relevant to the pupils at this school.

“For example, in year 3 pupils learn about the kingdom of Benin. This is because a large proportion of pupils have roots in Nigeria.”

Noble recalls that when Ofsted visited, the inspector asked to see pupils’ history books.

“We were like, we don’t have history books. I said, I’ll go and get some children for you, because they’re the knowledge. And I brought the children in, and they sat and talked to her about their history learning.”

Adapted curriculum frees up time

The school introduced an “identity curriculum” around 10 years ago after realising “lots of children weren’t quite sure who they were,” says Noble. It is aimed at making the curriculum relevant to all pupils.

The school has now “really built this so that by the time they leave us, they understand their place as a global citizen and really just have a sense of who they are”.

The way the school adapts the curriculum is key to its success, head Matt Morden says.

“The insistence on knowledge across the whole curriculum and the amount of knowledge that is intended to be taught is too much for people that follow it to the letter.

“So we look at all of the foundation subjects and go: what are the key things that we think our children need to understand from their context?”

“It frees up some time,” he adds. Whereas “other schools would feel they need to do everything”, Surrey Square is confident in its rationale for “reducing some of that content”.

That process is aided by an experienced staff. The average length of service here is 11.2 years. Noble has worked at the school for 17 years; Morden for 10.

That retention is “so important”, because “each year, they see what’s working for their class and the community, and it builds in that way”, says Morden.

Inside ‘The Hive’ resourced SEND provision

Children can join Surrey Square aged two via its on-site nursery provision, a colourful, fun space in purpose-built facilities funded by the sale of some of the school’s land for flats.

The school already offers free breakfast clubs for all pupils, another policy the government wants to emulate. All pupils are entitled to free school meals under a long-running Southwark council scheme. Take-up is around 90 per cent.

In what used to be the caretaker’s house, the school also operates ‘The Hive’, a resourced provision for around 16 pupils with the most complex needs.

Again, this is exactly the sort of provision Labour is looking to emulate as it seeks to make mainstream more inclusive.

I ask some of its pupils what they like about the school, and learning in The Hive.

“Learning and maths!” one pupil exclaims. “Being creative,” says another. They tell me they like it that there are only a few of them with two staff.

The children are transfixed by our photographer’s cameras. With his guidance, they take photos of Noble.

We meet Nicky, a parent who joined the school’s staff 17 years ago and now leads one of the groups in the Hive.

“I love it. I really do,” she says, “seeing the children achieve, children who really, really struggle. Seeing them able to shine.”

Supporting the school community

Hannah also started as a parent and has been on a “big journey” with Surrey Square.

When her children were pupils, the school stepped in to help her family move out of damp, mould-infested housing. It set her up with counselling when her former partner struggled with drug addiction. And the ‘family wellbeing lead’ supported her to tell her children when their father died.

“The first place I came was to school. I wouldn’t have got that [support] elsewhere,” she tells me. “Just to have an establishment, a group of just lovely people, showing me empathy and humanity was life-saving.”

Eniola Ogundolie was a pupil here until 2015. She joined in year 1 when her family arrived from Nigeria. She says: “The help that they provided, especially [with] that big a transition, it was amazing.

“After me, my two younger siblings came. They really make you feel like you’re part of the community, it’s a family.”

The school helped her get British citizenship. She kept in touch while her siblings were there, came back to volunteer, and now serves the school as a learning facilitator.

“I’m 10 years down the line, and they’re still doing things for other young kids that they did for me, it’s so consistent.”

‘Our families are just told to be grateful…it’s not OK’

Schools at the hearts of their communities is another idea that Labour is keen on. At Surrey Square, pupils come up with ways of solve local problems.

For example, year 3 pupils wrote to the council to complain of rodents in their homes, using rat-shaped paper. Their local councillor then visited the school to hear concerns.

“It is about challenging the status quo. So many of our families are expected to just be grateful for what they have,” Noble says.

She shows me a picture she has been sent of a family’s bathroom on a local estate, covered in black mould.

“They were told that they should be grateful for this bathroom, and that’s not OK.”

‘We’ve got much higher expectations’

Originally separate infant and junior schools on the same site, the school formed in 2009 when the two settings merged.

It became an academy in 2018 when its then-head Liz Robinson formed the Big Education trust with Peter Hyman, a former adviser to Tony Blair and more recently to Sir Keir Starmer in opposition.

Robinson, the trust’s chief executive, recalls last year’s Labour conference and says: “There was a lot of articulation about thriving and inclusion. Nicola and I were sitting there thinking ‘we’re already doing it; it’s possible’.”

She describes Surrey Square as the “embodiment of a nuanced approach which avoids the ridiculous binaries of being child-centred or knowledge-rich, progressive or traditional”.

The school teaches maths mastery and synthetic phonics, for example. But other things are “very different” from other schools, like the identity curriculum.

Robinson speaks of the need to “morally re-conceptualise what success is, because I will not be comfortable as a headteacher or CEO with a model of education that does not allow for success for every pupil”.

She also dismisses any potential accusation of low expectations. “I’ve got much higher expectations, because I’ve got expectations about every child, and I’ve got expectations around a broader range, which is inclusive of very high academic achievements, but not limited to.”