Developing Cultural Capital at Magdalen Gates Primary School
Every child that attends school and nursery at Magdalen Gates Primary School brings the richness of their experiences that are linked to their culture and wider family. This might include the languages they speak, their beliefs and traditions, their cultural and family heritage, and the places they have lived and visited.
Cultural capital is the accumulation of knowledge, behaviours, and skills that a child can draw upon to demonstrate their cultural awareness, knowledge, and competence. The child will draw upon their cultural capital to be successful as they progress through their life, society, their career and the world of work. At Magdalen Gates Primary School, our children’s cultural capital is developed through a curriculum that provide diversity and inclusion with space to respond to the children’s individual experiences of life.
Subject knowledge organisers for history, geography and science ensure that previous knowledge is built upon, and that the knowledge builds strong foundations for later learning. Subject leaders take responsibility for ensuring that our knowledge organisers include specialised and the substantive knowledge that gives our pupils the ability to think about and do things that otherwise they couldn’t.
At Magdalen Gates Primary School we want all children to leave our school with the essential skills to succeed at high school at beyond. At our school we believe that how we view ourselves really matters. We teach, encourage, and celebrate positive growth mindset and learning behaviours to all children in our school. We want all our children to leave Magdalen Gates Primary School being the best version of themselves.
Cultural capital gives power as it helps children achieve goals, become successful, and increase their life chances without necessarily having wealth or financial capital. The development of cultural capital opens doors and can give children the desire to aspire and achieve social mobility whatever their starting point.
Gradually widening children’s experiences as they progress through school is an important step in providing rich and engaging learning across the curriculum. We plan carefully for children to have progressively richer experiences from nursery to the end of year 6. Please ask your class teacher for more information.
British Values at Magdalen Gates Primary School
The school takes opportunities to promote British Values, defined by the government as the following:
• democracy
• the rule of law
• individual liberty
• mutual respect
• tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs
In actively promoting British Values, we will also focus on, and be able to show how our work with pupils is effective in, embedding fundamental British values. Actively promoting also means challenging pupils, staff or parents expressing opinions contrary to fundamental British Values, including ‘extremist’ views.
