Portico Academy Trust

At Friars we want our children to grow into healthy young adults. With this in mind, we focus on getting the children physically active as often as possible and attempt to find a sport to suit everyone. We invite a variety of agencies into the school to promote healthy living. We held a healthy eating focus week and found it so successful that we are going to continue this throughout the year. What does this mean? There will be only healthy choices I breakfast club, including

Throughout the last two weeks, schools from across Essex have been taking part in the South East Essex Design Competition. This annual contest has been a showcase of outstanding art and D&T work which children have completed as a part of their learning. This year, West Leigh entered the competition with work from all four year groups – Alice in Wonderland Tea Cups, Roman Shields, Mysterious Meso-American Truffles and Cam Toys. Mr Loveridge organised the event and was incredib

On Wednesday 15th March, Mr Loveridge was accompanied by his D&T Club in the Bloodhound Race for the Line Rocket Car competition. The 12 children had been working together in teams of 3 to create a rocket powered car with one goal – to travel as quickly as possible! Each team worked incredibly hard across a three week design and production period and thoroughly enjoyed their trip to Basildon to race their creations. The cars performed incredibly well on the day but sadly were

We were absolutely thrilled to have taken part in and attended the SEEDC (South East Essex Design Competition) awards ceremony at Chase High School on the evening of Monday 27th March. The SEEDC sees many local primary and secondary schools create showcases of their amazing art and design projects from school. We created an exhibition using work from years 3-6, using ‘Journey Through Time’ as our theme, demonstrating our cross-curricular approach to art and also the progress

On Friday 24th Porters celebrated Red Nose Day in style. In the weeks leading up to the event, the children bought over 200 red noses from the school office and these were worn very fashionably across the day itself. The children in years 2 to year 6 also came together in the afternoon for a special assembly. Mr Queenborough had kindly agreed to allow us to throw water over him in from of all of the children and staff. What he didn't know was that it wouldn't be water...

On Thursday 16th March, West Leigh attended the Essex Tag Rugby Finals having qualified as one of the best two school in Southend. The competition brought together the twenty best team from all over Essex so the standard of competition was always going to be difficult. In the morning, West Leigh played four games in their group and remarkable won all four games: West Leigh 6 - 1 Elmwood West Leigh 5 - 2 Thameside West Leigh 6 - 3 St. Thomas More West Leigh 6 - 5 Great B

In assembly on Monday 20th March, we were visited by Rachel from Rock Steady. Rachel demonstrated the different types of instruments that make up a band. The children were asked the names of the instruments and also the names of the songs that were played. Rachel played the electric guitar, bass guitar, electric drum kit and keyboard, then the most important part of any band, the singer. The children and staff were encouraged to sing along if they knew the song. The children

Twenty-four children from Year 2 travelled by coach to the Freight House in Rochford to take part in the South East Essex Infant Music Festival. This year's theme was 'Colour' and we performed 5 songs together with children from three other schools in the area. Each school took a turn to provide musical accompaniment to one of the songs and we also had the opportunity to perform 2 songs of our own on the stage. It was an exciting morning and the children were very proud to

We were delighted to welcome best-selling children’s author Nick Butterworth to school on Monday. Nick Butterworth was in school all day and held special assemblies for each year group, sharing some of his well-known stories with the children and talking to them about his work as an author and the joys of reading and writing. Nick then stayed on after school for a book signing and gave a short talk to parents about his work. We do hope the children enjoyed this exciting oppor