Inspiring Learning
Igniting Potential
We are St David’s
St David’s is a family-led school, which really stood out for us. With an environment that was stimulating but very nurturing as well.”
ST DAVID’S PARENT 2025
I would like to offer you a warm welcome and I am delighted that you are considering becoming part of the St David’s family.
I hope this prospectus gives you a flavour of life at St David’s. I know that choosing the right school for your child is an important decision and here at St David’s we can promise that we will consider every child as an individual and strive to meet both their academic and pastoral needs.
Our school is a small, family community where children feel safe and happy. We strive for high academic expectations through our engaging and varied curriculum. Our excellent specialist teaching inspires a love of learning, which allows pupils to flourish and prepares them for our rapidly changing world. Through a focus on pastoral support, our pupils are encouraged to have a voice and be the best version of themselves. They are encouraged to develop independence whilst feeling secure and nurtured. We are proud of not only of our consistently outstanding results but also of the confident, dynamic children who leave us at the end of Year 6 ready for the next step in their educational journey.
But don’t just take my word for it… come and visit us and see for yourself. Please contact the School Office for an appointment, as I would be delighted to show you around St David’s and give you a chance to see for yourself all that we have to offer at our wonderful school.
Mrs Sarah Syradd HEADTEACHER
St David’s
builds character
Vision
Inspiring Learning • Igniting Potential
Celebrating Success
Aims
• At St David’s, we aim to provide a nurturing, inspiring, and inclusive environment where every child has a voice and can thrive—both as a learner and as an individual.
We are committed to:
Fostering curiosity, creativity, and a lifelong love for learning.
• Helping each pupil grow in confidence and independence to fulfil their unique potential.
• Offering diverse, balanced learning experiences that inspire and challenge.
• Equipping pupils with the values, skills, and resilience to thrive at St David’s and beyond.
• Nurturing emotional, social, and moral development alongside academic success.
Values
The St David’s Way - helping you to find your:
We work hard to be the best version of ourselves.
We always keep trying to achieve our goals.
We aim high and embrace challenge.
We are responsible and kind.
We are curious and ask questions.
St David’s is a family
The small nature of our school means that we feel like a family. Staff get to know all of the pupils well, ensuring they are nurtured and supported individually on their learning journey. We believe in a strong home-school partnership, for every pupil to fulfil their potential. Our active Parent Teacher Association (PTA) supports this and provides exciting opportunities across the year to raise money for both pupils and charities to benefit from.
St David’s is ambitious
Our broad and balanced curriculum ensures that learning is engaging for all pupils, allowing them to reach their individual potential and achieve academic excellence. Pupils are encouraged to be ambitious, curious, to think creatively and take ownership of their learning. Talents are nurtured, skills are developed and success is celebrated.
Specialist teaching in Art, Music, Sport and French ensures that pupils’ learning experiences within these subjects are stimulating and exciting.
Dedicated staff apply their strengths to their teaching to ensure that their expertise and passion deliver energetic and innovative lessons of the highest quality, producing excellent outcomes.
St David’s promotes
Our curriculum is designed to spark curiosity, build critical thinking skills, encourage risktaking and foster a lifelong love of learning.
Throughout their journey with us, pupils approach their learning with resilience, determination and reflection. We understand that each child is unique, with their own interests, strengths and learning styles. Small class sizes allow individual success whilst also promoting collaboration. Pupils are encouraged to always have high expectations of themselves within their learning, to be proud of their achievements and to be prepared to navigate and thrive in an ever-changing world.
Staff are also invested in learning, acquiring skills and knowledge with an awareness of educational developments. Staff integrate modern technology with traditional methods to enhance the learning experience for pupils.
lifelong learners
We believe in nurturing the whole child through a rich and diverse curriculum that balances academic excellence with creative and personal growth.
St David’s pupils are stretched & supported
St David’s is a family school which places the pupil at the heart of everything it does. Being a small school ensures that every staff member knows each pupil, ensuring a phenomenal level of personal care and the creation of a learning environment in which every pupil thrives.
Our pastoral team coordinates academic support across the School. This means that all pupils are stretched and challenged. Our High Achievers programme ensures that our most able pupils are intellectually stretched and their talents are enhanced. Alongside this, pupils who require additional support are also helped on their journey through the use of individualised pupil passports, ensuring that they also reach their potential.
We benefit from an in-house speech and language therapist and school counsellor, as well as tailored access to additional professionals, such as educational psychologists, for pupils who would benefit from additional learning support. Our pastoral team also supports staff and parents to deliver the best individualised learning experience for every pupil.
St David’s is energetic
Sport and activities promote a healthy lifestyle and develop teamwork, discipline, resilience and personal motivation.
From an early age, our pupils enjoy an extensive range of sports and games. We take part in a range of local, national and regional fixtures and competitions to enhance the sporting experience at St David’s.
Our annual Sports Day, one of the highlights of the School year, offers pupils a unique opportunity to showcase an array of talents, engage in friendly competitions, and celebrate physical fitness in a fun and supportive environment.
Having our own dedicated sports facilities complete with large netball courts, an all-weather astro pitch, field and pavilion space, benefits our pupils, allowing the delivery of a high ability physical education experience.
Pupils from Nursery upwards enjoy specialist PE lessons and, from Year 1, additional Games afternoons. These lessons are designed to deliver a progressive curriculum in a variety of sports including football, netball, hockey, korfball, cricket, gymnastics, dance and athletics. Older pupils are coached to extend their sporting potential through extra-curricular opportunities. Pupils are taught swimming from Reception to Form 6 and take part in competitive fixtures in this field.
St David’s is expressive
At St David’s, our aim is to engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, this in turn to increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement.
In increasing depth, children learn about rhythm, pulse, timbre, dynamics, pitch and structure, through songs and musical activities. Children follow a structured programme of musical appreciation, listening to music from the Baroque period to the present day. Singing plays a key part for all children in their musical education at St David’s, both in the classroom and in assemblies.
From Nursery onwards, we follow the core values of listening, performing, singing and understanding and playing music.
There are many productions throughout the year, including class assemblies, musical theatre performances, concerts, Christmas performances and the eagerly anticipated, annual Year 6 production.
Drama also plays a prominent role at St David’s, interwoven with English and Music, as well as being offered as an extra-curricular opportunity.
St David’s is creative
Traditional skills are at the core of the children’s learning – drawing, colour theory, painting, collage, printing, textiles and 3D work. Technology allows them to expand on these skills further through stop-motion animation, filmmaking, photography, 3D modelling and 3D printing.
In Key Stage 2, pupils build on their knowledge of colour, shape, form, texture, and space in increasingly longer projects. Sketchbooks are used to explore
innovative ideas, develop skills and document progress over the year. In DT, pupils learn the design process of research, design, make, evaluate and use their everexpanding skill set to solve problems.
Art & DT lessons take place in the Art Room, a dedicated space equipped with everything the children need to thrive as creatives.
The Art and DT curriculum at St David’s School is designed to give children access to a wide variety of skills and techniques whilst stimulating their creativity and imagination.
Children are taught digital skills today that prepare them for the workplaces of tomorrow.
St David’s pupils are digitally aware
We carefully plan and invest for future technological advances at St David’s to ensure that ICT and Computing are constantly evolving in line with our modern and increasingly connected world. Every classroom is equipped with an interactive whiteboard, and there are class sets of tablets and Chromebooks available for classroom use, along with iPads, which are used for filming, editing and photography. In addition, we have a dedicated ICT suite to deliver our progressive computing curriculum, which has programming and coding embedded within it.
Online safety is of paramount importance as the rapid growth of technology poses challenges to our children not experienced by previous generations. E-safety is taught both explicitly and within other lessons at St David’s, ensuring that children and their parents are aware of the associated risks and learn to use technology in a safe and responsible way.
St David’s pupils are responsible global citizens
At St David’s, we actively seek to engage with our local and global communities.
As global citizens, pupils at St David’s are provided with opportunities to ensure they become aware of and understand the wider world – and their place in it. Pupils are given positions of responsibility through our democratically elected Pupil Leadership Team, our School Council, running from Year 1 to Form 6, our Eco Warriors and our Unity Dragons.
As part of our Creative Curriculum, pupils are taught skills in independent project study, debating, public speaking, interview practice and philosophy. In Year 5, pupils engage in an English Speaking Board (ESB) qualification to further enhance and develop these skills.
Through assemblies, RE lessons and the wider curriculum, we promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) development. Our assemblies, while ‘of a broadly Christian character’, are inclusive of other major world faiths. They bring children together to celebrate achievements, share learning and reflect on themes that foster kindness, respect and responsibility. By focusing on our school values, we uphold core British values and prepare children to contribute positively to life in modern Britain.
At St David’s, we actively seek to engage with our local and global communities. This may involve undertaking visits to interact with others outside of our school community or organising charitable events to raise money and support worthy causes.
As part of the Royal Russell Trust, we are proud of our local and international links with other schools in our group and regularly seek ways to interact within the Royal Russell Trust community.
Our Unity Dragons champion Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing across the School.
St David’s nurtures
Our school is proud of being a family school which places the utmost importance on ensuring that our pupils are happy and enjoy their time at school, whilst having their academic, emotional and physical needs catered for.
Our House System groups all pupils in Forms 3-6 into three Houses: Leo, Cygnus and Aquila. This structure offers pupils opportunities to connect with peers from across the School, fostering new friendships and promoting a sense of community. It also allows pupils the chance to develop leadership skills, build confidence and collaborate with others. Inter-House competitions also encourage teamwork across a range of subjects.
Our Dragon Family system brings together groups from across the whole school, creating a community of 15 mixed age groups with at least one pupil from each form.
Each term, we organise a family day during which pupils undertake activities with their families, allowing them to grow together and develop valuable social skills.
PSHE is taught as a spiral curriculum designed to equip pupils with essential life skills, emotional wellbeing, and an understanding of healthy relationships in an age-appropriate way. This curriculum is fully compliant with statutory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) guidelines.
We have school-based access to a Counsellor and a Speech and Language therapist, ensuring pupils and their parents feel well supported should further provision be required.
The wellbeing of pupils is a priority focus at St David’s and all interventions for pupils are coordinated by our Pastoral Assistant Head. As a school we promote Zones of Regulation, which is a complete social-emotional learning framework created to teach children selfregulation and emotional control.
St David’s pupils are future ready
The introduction of our whole school currency (Dragorys) and banking system fosters financial understanding from an early age, with opportunities for pupils in Forms 1–6 to ‘earn, spend or save’. The School Bank and School Shop are managed by pupils who are appointed to the role following an application process that mirrors the real world. Further jobs are advertised on the Classifieds Board and enable pupils to seek employment within the School.
Pupils in Form 6 take part in the Young Minds at Work Course, which is provided by LifeLab. Pupils take on management roles within a mini business, create a brand and develop products. The businesses present their products to a panel of judges, during Perfect Pitch, before selling to the wider school at an Enterprise Fair.
Micro Society also takes place in Form 6 with children exploring how society works. Pupils create a fledgling society including name, flag and currency before electing leaders, a government and running businesses within the society. Concepts such as benefits, taxes and exchange rates are examined and implemented within society.
Our Pupil Leadership Team is democratically elected each year. Candidates are asked to write and present a speech for consideration by the School and then all members of the School - staff and pupils - are invited to vote at the School polling station.
Preparation for secondary school is fully supported from Year 4 onwards. Secondary school transfer meetings are held for parents and followed up in Form 5 with individual meetings to discuss choices. The curriculum throughout Years 4-6 supports secondary school preparation, including booster groups, exam practice, interview preparation and a specialised curriculum designed to enhance relevant skills.
Our high academic expectations ensure the right school for the right pupil. We benefit from a partnership with Royal Russell and also send pupils to local grammar schools and a variety of independent schools.
Early Years
Nursery & Reception
Our Early Years’ programme lays the foundation for lifelong learning. In Early Years we provide the highestquality care and education for all our children in Nursery and Reception, giving them a solid foundation for their future learning.
In Early Years, we provide a stimulating, secure and safe learning environment, indoors and out, teaching a balanced curriculum based on the EYFS framework across the seven areas of learning. We work closely in partnership with parents to develop the whole child, enabling children to become creative, independent thinkers who reach their potential.
Staff plan challenging learning experiences based on the individual child, informed by observation and assessment, and provide opportunities for children to engage in activities that are adult-led, adult-initiated and child-initiated. From Nursery onwards, children receive specialist teaching in Music and PE. This expands to include French and ICT from Reception onwards.
We adhere to the statutory framework of the EYFS and follow these four overarching principles:
• Every child is a unique child, who is constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured.
• Children learn to be strong and independent through positive relationships.
• Children learn and develop well in enabling environments, in which their experiences respond to their individual needs, and there is a strong partnership between practitioners and parents and/ or carers.
• Children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates.
We invite parents to actively participate in their child’s learning journey through regular updates, parentteacher meetings and ‘drop-in’ sessions at our outdoor learning sessions on the School field.
Our programme is enriched with special events, outdoor learning opportunities and engaging teaching methods that make learning enjoyable and effective.
St David’s is adventurous
We are proud to provide a huge range of extracurricular clubs. These take place before school, during lunchtimes and after school. Every member of the teaching staff runs a club as well as external providers such as Playball, BB Soccer, Gymnastics, Jam Coding, CCF and Chess. Pupils are encouraged to take risks and try something new, with the range of clubs offering something for everyone.
Each term, every class undertakes an educational visit, welcomes a guest educator or holds an enrichment activity to bring a creative element to learning and consolidate the curriculum in an engaging and exciting way. Residentials are held in Form 4 and Form 6 to provide pupils with an opportunity to develop new skills, independence, knowledge and confidence.
We promote a well-rounded approach, combining academic excellence with active involvement in exciting co-curricular activities.
St David’s has heritage
St David’s School in Purley, founded in 1912 by sisters Miss Mary and Miss Margery Talfourd Jones from Brecon, South Wales, began with just 5 pupils. Named after their Patron Saint, the School has evolved while maintaining its traditions. After a relocation to Gloucestershire in WWII, the School returned to Purley.
Over the years, five Head Teachers, have shaped the School. The School has undergone significant changes, including an expansion of new classrooms, an assembly hall and further upgrades over the years.
In 2022 St David’s went into partnership with Royal Russell and, in 2024, Mrs Sarah Syradd became the School’s eighth Head Teacher, marking a new and exciting era in leading the School forward as part of the Royal Russell Trust.
St David’s is proud of its Welsh heritage and the annual St David’s Day celebrations include a traditional Eisteddfod recital competition as well as coming together in our Dragon families to enjoy our culture in a fun and exciting way.
Wraparound care nursery to form 6
Our wraparound care is situated in the School building, with access to indoor and outdoor play areas, a quiet area and a recreational area. It is managed by carefully selected staff, all of whom are fully trained, DBS checked and inspected.
Breakfast club | 7:30am – 8:10am
We launched our Breakfast Club in January 2025, running all through the week.
Children will have a choice of cereal, fruit and toast.
After school club | Until 6:30pm
We offer an internal After School Club facility called “The Dragons” which is available to all pupils from the close of the School day.
Children are given the opportunity to learn, play and relax with their friends whilst joining in a range of activities.
Children will be given a light tea to refuel after their day.
Holiday Club
We run holiday clubs in the Half Terms and holiday breaks.
For more information about The Dragons Wraparound Care and Holiday Club, please email:
stdavidsafterschool@royalrussell.co.uk.
A typical day at st david’s
7.30am
8.10am
8.30am
9.05am
12.00/12.30pm
Our in-house Breakfast Club begins, offering a range of cereal, toast and fruit to begin the day.
Our staggered start to the day allows pupils to arrive and interact with their friends, whilst supervised in the playground. Some extracurricular clubs may take place at this time.
Our school day begins with registration followed by assembly, Form time or House meeting.
Morning lessons start and the learning journey begins incorporating a 20-minute break time mid-morning.
Lunchtime begins. Our school lunches, provided by our in-house catering team, Thomas Franks, are carefully designed to be both nutritious and delicious.
1.30pm
Afternoon lessons continue to provide a broad and balanced curriculum.
3.15-3.40pm A staggered finish takes place, starting with our youngest pupils, and an exciting array of extracurricular activities begin.
3.15-6.30pm
Our After School Club (Dragons) provides a fun and relaxing way for pupils to wind down after a busy day. With a variety of games and activities, plus a light tea provided, it is a perfect end to the School day.
Join us
Most pupils join the Nursery class at St David’s in the September directly before their fourth birthday. Children are welcome to join Nursery in the actual term of their third birthday, but please note that these children will remain with their correct age group and will not progress to Reception until the September before their fifth birthday.
Children progress to the Reception class in the Autumn term which precedes their fifth birthday, when additional places may become available. There are no formal Entrance Tests for pupils wishing to enter the Early Years classes.
Pupils are welcome to apply to join us at any other time and will be considered for admission into Forms 1 to 6 on a case-by-case basis. Children will be given the opportunity to spend a taster day with us and undertake some informal assessments to ensure that our environment is one in which they will thrive.
To formally apply for a place at St David’s, a School Registration Form must be completed and sent to us with a non-refundable Registration Fee.
You are welcome to visit us at any time to tour our school so that you can see St David’s in action and meet the Head Teacher, Mrs Sarah Syradd. Please contact the School Office to book an appointment.
Please come along and explore for yourself all that our wonderful school has to offer to you and your child.