Clubs & Activities

As part of our aim to make a child’s experience of life at Waterwells fulfilling, we offer a range of clubs and activities that take place during and after the school day. We feel it is important that every child finds something they can enjoy and be successful at.

We have two different types of clubs. Payable clubs provided by outside providers and those run voluntarily by school staff.

Staff-run, voluntary clubs

Staff do not have to offer extra-curricular clubs and by offering them they are offering this out of their own time. Consequently, this often means clubs change on a termly basis and don’t run all year round.

Process:

• Staff choose what club they would like to run, when and to what year group.
• During the first week of each term, letters are offered in class to the children of the applicable year group. The class teacher explains what the club is and pupils who express an interest get a letter.

Allocating club places to pupils:

If oversubscribed, we allocate places for free, staff-run clubs based on the following ordered criteria:

• Children who have not been successful in attending a school club before (during that academic year)*. An internal tracker for this is kept in school where teachers mark off against class lists, which clubs pupils have attended).
• For any remaining places, slips/names are then ‘drawn from a hat’.

*If at the start of the school year, where no one has attended a club yet, names/slips are randomly ‘drawn’.

Payable clubs:

We looked to include some payable clubs to offer additional club opportunities. Feedback from our parents is that they would like even more clubs for their children. Payable clubs is an alternative way of offering more opportunities as we cannot expect staff to run after school clubs.

As these clubs are payable, the providers choose to run these on a first come, first served basis because they rely on the numbers to warrant them running the club and covering their coaching/staffing costs. These clubs do however run at larger numbers and it’s not very often that pupils are unable to gain a place.

In addition to clubs, we also enter sports competitions and have take part in inter-school athletics championships, cross country, tag rugby competitions, football and netball matches to name but a few!