Schools within Kings Hill and the surrounding area
Reconnecting with the natural classroom
Natural spaces give children a stronger sense of place and physical connection, healthier eating habits from growing their own food, and simply being outdoors can improve mental and emotional health and better motor skills can be developed in outside play.
It is a message that has found a perfect home at Kings Hill where three primary schools sit amid 800 acres providing a safe, relaxed environment for learning.
At Kings Hill Primary School – set in its generous five acres of grounds – outdoor learning is already a lesson that has been learned. Outside is where pupils come alive, in its four outdoor areas – a pond and bird reserve, the whispering woods, a wildflower meadow and the storytelling circle. A lesson can start with an apple pip and spread through biology, maths, food production, nutrition, history, animal welfare, insect life, or anywhere that a young imagination can take it.
Discovery School pupils in the woodland classroom
Pupils from Kings Hill’s Valley Invicta School discovering type 24 pill boxes from World War II
Learning about the past
History is more fun when the fabric that helped create it is right on your school’s doorstep.
Kings Hill’s connection with its history inspired a public art commission – A Place of Landings, a series of artworks by artist Richard Wolfströme.
Word trails with stories, quotes and ideas – gathered from veterans and the community –have been set in bronze and embedded into the surfaces around the shopping area at the heart of Kings Hill, Liberty Square.
Another roundel surrounds a place for people to sit and reflect on the memories gathered from the community and picked out in bronze text. Word trails, containing historical memories, form wavy lines of flying texts along the walkways, while two narrative straight lines echo the path of the original runway.
Now – nearly 80 years on – a new generation of children can once again learn the names, shapes and roles of the aircraft as the community reconnects with its past.
The School run
Core values
Children today owe much to the fruit farmers who have tended the orchards in this corner of Kent’s Garden of England for hundreds of years. Lush crops needed young, nimble fingers to harvest ripe apples, pears and hops, and so the UK’s six-week summer school holiday was born to supply them.
Generations later, most of the fruit trees might be gone, but the roots of the holidays are still here. This enduring relationship with the land and its harvest continues. When names were being sought for the dozens of new roads created for Kings Hill, the land provided the answers.
Pippins, Braeburns, Discovery and rarer breeds such as Elstar, Lord Lambourne and, of course, Liberty have been remembered in the street names criss-crossing its 800 acres.
For information regarding Kent County Council Education & Learning visit – www.kent.gov.uk/education-and-children
