Mayhill is a unique school that serves both the local village community and the community of RAF Odiham. We believe strongly that alongside strong academic achievement, children should value this sense of community and develop the emotional and personal characteristics that will help them thrive in tomorrow's world. Our curriculum develops skills, knowledge and understanding through individual subjects and project based learning. 

What are the Mayhill habits?

We believe that children learn best when they can learn about their own learning. The more they are able to reflect on the way their mind works, the more they can learn to make conscious decisions based on these reflections. And at Mayhill, we believe it is our role to help develop these positive characteristics and attributes alongside knowledge and understanding of the curriculum. 

How did you decide on these? 

The Mayhill habits were selected following research into key employability skills. They were revised and refreshed in September 2018 after discussion with our parents, pupils, teachers and governors and reflected the outcomes in the report by the Young Enterprise Trust - see attachment below. 

How do you support children to  make progress in these? 

We are committed to helping all of our children develop these Habits as part of their everyday learning experience. The habits are incorporated into homework set for each year group and provide interesting learning experiences which embed the habits into everyday life too. Our teachers are embedding the habits in lessons and schemes of work and they are built on through our whole school behaviour policy. Ultimately, we want Mayhill to be a community of learners who are self-reflective and who support each other to be collaborative, critical thinkers, communicative, resilient, respectful and independent. We are doing this in a number of ways:

• Building opportunities to explicitly develop Habits into schemes of work and lesson planning.
• Rewarding children for demonstrating progress in acquiring Mayhill Habits through house points, monthly assemblies and then reporting this progress to parents.
• Developing opportunities for children to engage in home learning tasks that focus their attention on developing these skills.
• Commending children for positively demonstrating the Mayhill Habits at lunchtime with 'Golden Tickets' issued. 
• Providing children with the language to be able to reflect on their progress.

Sounds great - but how do you really know they are making progress in these?

Developing our skills in these areas does not stop when we finish Mayhill, or school or work. We can be independent with one skill but heavily reliant when it comes to another. So progress is not finite, instead it is measured through our children's ability to reflect, to question their actions, and to make conscious decisions based on these. We believe the more they can do this, the greater those choices become Habits.