What makes Mousehole special?
Relationships
Education is a personal experience and each child’s educational journey is different. We work hard on getting to know all our children well. We pride ourselves on the excellent relationships we foster and believe that children have the best chance of success when the school and parents work together. Our staff are in the playground at the beginning and end of each day. "The teachers provide fabulous support and have a positive relationship with the children" parent survery 2025. We hold regular events when parents are encouraged to come into school to share in the children’s learning.
Environment
Mousehole is indeed a special place to learn. The original buildings have been at the heart of this beautiful village for over 100 years. The recent refurbishments and state of the art extension (finished in 2011) have created an excellent learning environment including a large hall, three classrooms, a library, on-site kitchen, meeting room, cookery room and a purpose built Early Years block (including a large reception classroom, preschool room and two outside learning areas). Our other outdoor areas include a picnic and teaching space, climbing walls, community garden and poly tunnel, sports area, new large structure play equipment and a play pod. All of which get used pretty much daily.
Pupil Voice
It is important that children see the school as their school. To this end our children take an active part in determining the direction our school takes. Every class has representation on our school council and the council works with the school parliament to propose, research and present motions to our termly parliament assemblies. Children then vote on the motions. Successful motions that have been passed recently are improved play equipment for the playground, improved lunch menus after a meeting with the lead from Aspens and updated school values. We encourage all our children to take on roles of responsibility e.g. running lunchtime clubs, meeting and greeting guests, taking on jobs and monitoring roles.
Outdoor Education
We are committed to using the wider environment to enhance the education of our children. Each class delivers a minimum of 10% of its timetable outside of the classroom; in practice it is usually much more than this, especially for our younger classes. The children receive regular woodland skills sessions and use the village, beach and the school field and woodland to enhance the curriculum. In addition each class arranges regular visits further afield.
Each year the older children have the opportunity to take part in an activity week staying at one of the county’s outdoor centres or a trip out of county. These very popular trips are an excellent chance for the children to gain self confidence before they move on to their next school.
Creativity
Fostering creativity is very important to us. Creative approaches are encouraged across the curriculum not just in the arts. Creative solutions are encouraged at all levels and the ability to see things from different perspectives is celebrated. We are very lucky to be part of a community of very creative people and many of them work with the school. Over the last two years we have worked with film makers, actresses, musicians, authors, chefs, graphic designers, sculptors, puppeteers and poets. If you know of anyone who could further broaden the children’s educational experience, please let us know.
Health and wellbeing
We work very hard to ensure the children at Mousehole School have the tools they need to lead a healthy life. We provide a yoga club and mindfulness sessions for children. We have well being ambassadors who share in weekly celebration assemblies the positive behaviours and experiences spotted during that week They have been trained alongside Sarah Sejahtera (MHST) in Decider Skills to support children with their emotions. Ms Munday and Mrs Trow are Mental Health First Aiders and Ms Munday is our Mental Health Leader. She writes a monthly newsletter to share and sign post any helpful groups, websites to support the community. We have an annual sports week event which includes different sporting opportunities and run programmes of harbour and beach skills which include learning about being safe in and around the sea. We have a very full PE curriculum and provide (for a school of this size) a full extra curriculum offer of sports clubs. We also have a track record of being successful in a range of school sport.
Music
We are very lucky to have Advanced Skills Music Teacher Ms Judge working here one day a week. Ms Judge is inspirational and responsible for our samba band in the Mazey Day Parade, St Piran instrumentalists and singing at St Piran and Songfest concerts as well as the fantastic Minack local schools production each summer. Ms Judge delivers an engaging progressive curriculum and due to this and the multitude of peripatetic teachers nearly a third of the students play a musical instrument. We have on-site instrumental lessons for piano, guitar, violin, keyboard, brass and drums. Skiff and Lugger Class have the opportunity to learn recorders and a brass instrument in whole class sessions. We celebrate all the music through community assemblies, concerts and school productions.