Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural Development
Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Development
At Kells Lane, we take our responsibility for children’s spiritual, moral, social and cultural development seriously. SMSC is not a subject on a timetable — it is the fabric of our school. It is present in the way we treat each other, the curriculum we teach, the experiences we provide, the community we build and the values we live by every day. It is what makes Kells Lane not just a school, but a place where children grow into thoughtful, courageous and compassionate human beings.
“At Kells Lane, we do not just teach children what to think. We help them understand who they are, how to treat others, and what kind of world they want to help build.”
Spiritual Development
Spiritual development at Kells Lane is about helping children develop a sense of self, a curiosity about the world, and an appreciation of what is meaningful, beautiful and profound in human experience. We nurture spiritual development through:
Reflection and stillness
We create regular opportunities for children to be still, to reflect and to think deeply — whether through quiet moments in the school day, reflective activities in RE and RHE, or the values-led assemblies that bring our whole community together.
Awe and wonder in the curriculum
Our curriculum is deliberately designed to provoke wonder. In Science, children explore the natural world and the forces that shape it. In History, they encounter remarkable human stories of courage, sacrifice and change. In Geography, they grapple with the fragility of the planet. In Art, they find beauty and meaning in the world around them. These moments of genuine curiosity and awe are spiritual experiences, and we value them.
Religious Education
Our RE curriculum helps children explore the big questions of human existence — about meaning, purpose, identity and belief. Children learn about a range of world faiths and worldviews, developing genuine understanding of and respect for beliefs different from their own.
At Kells Lane, RE goes beyond the classroom. We are committed to giving children first hand experience of the faiths and worldviews they study — meeting people of faith, visiting places of worship and encountering different ways of seeing the world with curiosity and respect. Our programme of RE visits and visitors across Key Stage 2 includes:
• Year 3 — Durham Cathedral: children visit one of the most magnificent Norman cathedrals in Europe, exploring Christian worship, architecture and the spiritual significance of sacred spaces.
• Year 4 — Synagogue visit: children visit a local synagogue, learning about Jewish faith, tradition and community life from members of the congregation.
• Year 5 — Hindu temple visit: children visit a Hindu temple, experiencing Hindu worship and culture first-hand and developing a deeper understanding of one of the world’s oldest living faiths.
• Year 5 — Humanist visitor: a humanist speaker visits school to work directly with Year 5 children, helping them understand non-religious worldviews and the values and ethics that guide the lives of those without religious belief.
• Year 6 — Mosque visit: children visit a local mosque, learning about Islamic faith, practice and community from members of the Muslim community. This carefully sequenced programme ensures that by the time children leave Kells Lane, they have encountered — not just read about — Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Humanism.
They have met real people of faith and worldview, asked real questions, and developed the genuine understanding and respect that is the foundation of life in a diverse society.
Explore our RE curriculum -Religious Education
Climate and sustainability — Eco School Green Flag
Our Climate Education & Sustainability curriculum connects children to the natural world and helps them develop a sense of responsibility for its care. We hold the Eco School Green Flag — an internationally recognised award for schools that embed environmental action and sustainability across school life.
Children are not passive learners of climate science at Kells Lane — they are active environmental changemakers. Our Eco-Committee leads on sustainability initiatives across the school, from eco-friendly pens and refillable glue sticks to plastic lid collections and tree planting with the Forestry Commission.
We also partner with Groundwork North East on real environmental projects and work with Oasis Community Housing on sustainable housing and homelessness awareness. Understanding our place in the natural world — and our duty to protect it — is a profoundly spiritual and moral dimension of education at Kells Lane.
Climate Education & Sustainability - Climate Education & Sustainability
Moral Development
Moral development at Kells Lane is about helping children develop a strong sense of right and wrong, an understanding of why values matter, and the courage to act on their convictions.
Healthy Schools Status
Kells Lane holds Healthy Schools Status — an external accreditation awarded following a full-day validation visit in which an independent assessor spoke with children, staff and leaders, toured the school and evaluated provision across four areas: healthy eating, physical activity, PSHE, and children’s social and emotional wellbeing.
The assessor described Kells Lane as “an exciting yet emotionally supportive learning environment” and noted that children’s changing social and emotional needs are consistently “managed and responded to with dignity and compassion, with an awareness that behaviour is communicating need.”
He described the children themselves as “articulate, thoughtful, and confident” and wrote that the pupil guides who showed him around the school “were a credit to themselves, the school, and their families.” Healthy Schools Status is not awarded to every school that applies — it is earned.
Rights Respecting School — Gold Accreditation
We are enormously proud to hold Rights Respecting School Gold accreditation — one of the highest recognitions a primary school can achieve for its commitment to children’s rights.
At a Gold RRSA school, children’s rights are not just taught — they are lived. Children understand their own rights and the rights of others, and this shapes how we treat each other, how we resolve conflict and how we engage with the wider world. Children are empowered to speak up when rights are not respected — their own or anyone else’s.
Rights Respecting School - Rights Respecting School
Behaviour rooted in values
Our approach to behaviour — informed by the work of Paul Dix and his book 'When the Adults Change, Everything Changes' — is built on the belief that children develop moral understanding through positive, consistent relationships with adults who model the values they expect.
Positive Noticing, restorative practice and our trauma-informed whole-staff approach all reflect a moral commitment to seeing every child as worthy of dignity, patience and care.
Behaviour & Relationships - Behaviour & Relationships
Community, charity and service
Children at Kells Lane learn that being a good person involves action, not just intention. We support charitable causes, engage in community events and encourage children to think about how they can make a positive difference to the lives of others — locally, nationally and globally.
Each year at harvest time, children collect food donations for the Each year at harvest time, children and families collect food donations for Gateshead Foodbank — ensuring that families in our local community who are struggling have access to food at one of the most important times of year.
At Christmas, children collect and donate gifts for the Salvation Army Gateshead Christmas present appeal, bringing joy to children and families who might otherwise go without. These are not one-off gestures. They are annual traditions that teach children, year on year, that they have the power and the responsibility to make a difference to the lives of others in their community.
One of our most treasured community traditions is our annual Christmas visit to a local residential care home, where our choir performs for residents. For many of the children, this is their first experience of performing for a community audience beyond the school gates — and for the residents, it is a moment of genuine joy and connection. It is a simple act of kindness that speaks directly to the values at the heart of Kells Lane.
Links with local faith communities
Kells Lane has strong and valued links with two local churches — Wesley Methodist Church and St Helen’s Church — which form an important part of the school’s connection to the wider Low Fell community. These partnerships enrich children’s spiritual and social development, providing opportunities to engage with the local faith community, to understand the role that places of worship play in community life, and to experience the values of service, reflection and belonging that sit at the heart of both the school’s ethos and the communities around it.
Our links with Wesley and St Helen’s reflect our commitment to being a school that is genuinely rooted in its community — not just within our walls, but beyond them.
Water Smart Schools — Royal Life Saving Society Gold Award
Kells Lane is a proud holder of the Water Smart Schools Gold Award — the highest level of the Water Smart Schools programme, accredited by the Royal Life Saving Society UK. This rigorous whole-school accreditation requires the school to teach water safety knowledge across every year group, take children on real-world water field trips, involve parents and the wider community, and embed a sustained commitment to keeping children safe in and around water.
Drowning is one of the leading causes of accidental death in children in the UK. This award reflects our belief that every child — regardless of background — deserves the knowledge and skills to stay safe for life.
Personal safety education — CLEVER Never Goes
At Kells Lane, we teach children that keeping themselves safe is both a right and a responsibility. We use the CLEVER Never Goes programme — the modern, evidence informed replacement for the outdated Stranger Danger message — to give children the practical safety skills they need to recognise and respond to unsafe situations, whether outside or online.
Rather than teaching children to fear everyone they don’t know, CLEVER Never Goes teaches children to recognise when anyone — even someone known to them — is asking them to go somewhere that hasn’t been agreed in advance by a trusted adult. It is positive, practical and age-appropriate.
This is moral education in its most essential form — helping children understand that they have the right to feel safe, the tools to recognise danger, and the confidence to act on their instincts.
Find out more at clevernevergoes.org - https://clevernevergoes.org/
British Values
Our curriculum actively promotes the four fundamental British Values: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance. These are not abstract concepts at Kells Lane — they are living principles that shape how we treat each other and engage with the world every day.
Social Development
Social development at Kells Lane is about helping children develop the skills, understanding and dispositions to work well with others, contribute to their communities and take their place in the wider world with confidence and kindness.
Smart School Council — Ambassador School
Kells Lane is a Smart School Council Ambassador School — one of a select group of schools nationally chosen to represent and champion best practice in pupil voice and democratic participation. The Smart School Council principle is simple: every child’s voice matters — not just the most confident few.
Every class, every child, every week.
Our pupil-led Class Meetings give every child a real voice in how our school is run, and our Communication Team ensures that voice is heard and acted upon. This is pupil voice as a lived experience, not a display board exercise. Kells Lane’s approach to Smart School Council has been featured by the organisation as an example of best practice nationally.
The Kells Lane Cabinet
One of the things we are most proud of at Kells Lane is our Kells Lane Cabinet — a group of pupil representatives who work directly alongside Mrs Swinbank to help shape and lead aspects of school life.
The Cabinet gives children a genuine and meaningful voice in their school community — debating issues, making decisions and taking responsibility for real outcomes that affect their peers. Cabinet members hold named roles that mirror real-world democratic and civic structures. This is democracy in action, not just democracy as a lesson topic.
Children who hold Cabinet roles leave Kells Lane with something that cannot be taught from a textbook: the knowledge, earned through experience, that they are capable of leading, serving and making a real difference.
Find out more about the Kells Lane Cabinet - Citizenship
Oracy and communication
Through our partnership with Voice 21, oracy is embedded across the curriculum at Kells Lane. Children develop the confidence and skill to articulate their ideas clearly, listen carefully to others, engage respectfully in debate and make their voice heard. These are the foundations of social participation.
Wellbeing and emotional literacy
Children who understand their own emotions are better equipped to understand and respond to the emotions of others. Our THRIVE approach, Melva mental health curriculum, TGMC and trauma-informed practice all contribute to children’s social development — building empathy, self-regulation and the ability to maintain positive relationships.
Wellbeing at Kells Lane -Wellbeing at Kells Lane
Curriculum links — democracy, rights and justice across the year groups
Social and moral understanding is not confined to assemblies or PSHE lessons at Kells Lane. It is woven into the curriculum across every year group, with carefully sequenced units that build children’s knowledge of democracy, rights, justice and civic life progressively from Year 2 to Year 6.
• Year 2 — Women’s right to vote: children study the history of the suffragette movement, focusing on Flora Drummond and local North East suffragettes. Children learn about the struggle for equal voting rights and what it means to stand up for justice — connecting national history to their own region.
• Year 3 — Ancient Greece and democracy: children explore the origins of democracy in Ancient Greece, understanding how ideas developed thousands of years ago continue to shape how our society is governed today.
• Year 3 — The Blaydon Races: children study the history and cultural significance of the Blaydon Races — a defining piece of North East heritage — and explore the artwork it has inspired, including works displayed at the Shipley Art Gallery. This unit connects local cultural history to art, identity and community pride.
• Year 4 — Law and Order: a dedicated unit exploring how our country is governed, the role of Parliament, how laws are made and upheld, and the relationship between citizens and the state. Children develop a genuine understanding of the democratic structures that underpin life in modern Britain.
• Year 6 — I Have a Dream: discrimination and justice: children study Martin Luther King Jr and the American civil rights movement, exploring themes of discrimination, injustice and the power of peaceful protest. This unit makes direct connections to Newcastle and the North East, helping children understand that the struggle for equality has local as well as global dimensions.
This sequenced programme ensures that by the time children leave Kells Lane, they have a deep and nuanced understanding of democracy, rights, justice and civic responsibility — not as abstract concepts, but as living ideas that connect to their own community, their own history and their own lives.
Citizenship - Citizenship
Cultural Development
Cultural development at Kells Lane is about helping children understand, appreciate and contribute to culture — their own and others'. It is about building the knowledge, experiences and sensibilities that allow children to engage with the full richness of human life.
Local heritage at the heart of our curriculum — Heritage Schools Award
Kells Lane is a proud holder of the Historic England Heritage Schools Award — external recognition that local heritage is the golden thread that runs through our curriculum. This is not a display board achievement. It reflects years of deliberate, structured curriculum design that puts Gateshead, Low Fell and the North East at the heart of what children learn and how they see themselves.
Children learn about Gateshead, the North East and their own community, understanding how local history connects to national and global events. Landmarks, people and stories from Low Fell and the wider region feature across subjects — giving children a deep sense of place, identity and pride in where they come from.
The Blaydon Races — one of the North East’s most celebrated pieces of cultural heritage — is studied in Year 3, where children explore its history and the artwork it has inspired, including works displayed at the Shipley Art Gallery. Children visit the gallery as part of this unit, seeing their local world through an artist’s eyes and understanding how culture, community and history interweave.
Our original artwork by Charlie Rogers — the beloved Gateshead artist who painted Kells Lane itself — hangs in our school. His love of Saltwell Park, just streets away, connects our children to a living artistic tradition rooted in the very streets they walk every day.
Explore our History curriculum - History
Music Mark of Recognition
Kells Lane holds the Music Mark of Recognition — a national award celebrating schools that demonstrate a genuine commitment to improving music education and ensuring it is available to all pupils, not just the already confident or already engaged.
To achieve the Music Mark, a school must evidence a clear strategy for music that supports every child. At Kells Lane, music is not a privilege or an extra. It is part of what it means to be a whole, creative, expressive human being — and every child in our school deserves access to it.
The arts, performance and creativity
Every child at Kells Lane participates in the arts. Our choir, orchestra, annual productions, dance clubs and creative arts curriculum give every child the opportunity to experience, create and perform. Children encounter music, art, drama and dance not as optional extras but as essential parts of a complete education — developing creativity, expression, confidence and cultural literacy.
Our cultural arts programme is deliberately sequenced across Key Stage 2, ensuring every child has access to a rich and progressive range of artistic experiences at significant venues across Gateshead and the North East.
Music
Kells Lane has a school choir that performs regularly throughout the year. Year 4 children take part in the Big Sing at the Glasshouse — a large-scale choral event at one of the North East’s premier cultural venues, performing alongside schools from across Gateshead in a shared celebration of music. Year 5 children attend a live performance by the Northern Sinfonia — the resident orchestra of the Glasshouse and one of the finest chamber orchestras in the UK.
Experiencing world-class live orchestral music in a professional concert hall is a transformative moment for many of our children.
Dance
Year 5 children take part in a whole year group Dance Festival at the Glasshouse — performing on the Glasshouse stage in front of a live audience. This is not a classroom activity. It is a professional performance experience at a world-class venue, and it gives children a sense of what it means to perform, to prepare, and to share something they have created with an audience.
Drama and theatre
Every child in Key Stage 2 attends the pantomime at a local theatre each year — experiencing live theatre as an audience member and developing the cultural literacy and love of storytelling that underpins all great drama.
Year 6 children also write, rehearse and perform a full production at the Little Theatre in Low Fell — a professional performance venue opposite Saltwell Park. A real stage, a real audience, and the genuine sense of achievement that comes from bringing a full show to life. It is one of the most memorable experiences of a child’s time at Kells Lane.
Art and visual culture
Children at Kells Lane visit the Shipley Art Gallery — a world-class gallery just down the road from Low Fell — connecting children to the visual arts and to the cultural life of their own community. We treat the Shipley as our local gallery, not a distant destination, and visits are woven into our art curriculum to deepen children’s understanding of how art is made, curated and experienced.
Made in the North East Week
Every July, during Transition Week, the whole school takes part in Made in the North East Week — a full week of creative activities celebrating local and regional artists, craftspeople and makers. Children explore the extraordinary breadth of creative talent in their own region, working in the styles and traditions of North East artists and developing a deep pride in the cultural heritage of where they come from.
Made in the North East Week is not a single lesson or a day trip. It is a sustained, whole school immersion in regional culture — the kind of experience that stays with children long after they leave Kells Lane.
Literary and storytelling culture
Kells Lane takes part in the Gateshead Author Events programme, where authors visit school to share their books and stories directly with children. Meeting a real author — hearing how they found their ideas, how they write, and why stories matter to them — is a powerful experience for young readers and writers. It brings literacy alive in a way that no classroom lesson alone can replicate.
Religious and cultural diversity
Our RE curriculum helps children explore a wide range of world faiths and cultural traditions, developing genuine curiosity about and respect for ways of life different from their own. Cultural diversity is celebrated at Kells Lane, and children are helped to see the richness that different perspectives and traditions bring to our shared world.
Children do not just study faiths and worldviews from a distance — they encounter them in person. Our programme of visits to places of worship and visitors into school gives every child direct, meaningful contact with the diversity of beliefs and cultures that make up modern Britain and the wider world.
By the time children leave Kells Lane they will have visited Durham Cathedral, a synagogue, a Hindu temple and a mosque, and welcomed a humanist speaker into school — experiencing five distinct worldviews through the people who actually live them.
Cultural capital for every child
We are deliberate about ensuring that cultural development is genuinely universal at Kells Lane — not reserved for some children and unavailable to others. Residentials, visits, performances, competitions and enrichment activities are accessible to every child, with Pupil Premium funding actively removing financial barriers. Cultural Capital at Kells Lane - Cultural Capital
Our Character Development Lead
Miss Gemma Endean — Character Development Lead & Shape Cultural Ambassador
Character development at Kells Lane is led by Miss Gemma Endean, who holds a dual role that reflects the school’s commitment to both the moral development of every child and to connecting children with the richest possible cultural experiences.
Character Development Lead
As Character Development Lead, Miss Endean leads the school’s work on SMSC, ensuring that spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is intentional, coherent and embedded across every area of school life. She works with staff to ensure that character education — the values, dispositions and habits of mind that enable children to flourish — is as deliberately cultivated as academic knowledge.
Shape Cultural Ambassador
Miss Endean is also Kells Lane’s Shape Cultural Ambassador — a role established by Shape, Gateshead’s Cultural Education Partnership, to connect schools to the wider cultural life of the city. As Cultural Ambassador, Miss Endean is the named contact at Kells Lane for cultural opportunities across Gateshead — bringing creative practitioners, artists and cultural partners into school, connecting children to the region’s venues, heritage sites and creative programmes, and ensuring Kells Lane is at the heart of Gateshead’s cultural education network.
This role gives Kells Lane children privileged access to cultural experiences and creative opportunities across the region — from the Glasshouse and Shipley Art Gallery to outdoor heritage programmes and community arts partnerships.
Find out more about Shape, Gateshead’s Cultural Education Partnership - https://shapegatesheadculture.com/
SMSC Across the School
SMSC development at Kells Lane is a whole-school responsibility.
It is embedded in our curriculum design, our teaching, our pastoral care, our behaviour approach and our enrichment offer. Every member of staff — and every interaction between adults and children — contributes to it.
The pages below give further detail about the specific provision that underpins our SMSC offer:
Rights Respecting School - Rights Respecting School
Citizenship - Citizenship
Wellbeing at Kells Lane - Wellbeing at Kells Lane
Cultural Capital - Cultural Capital
Climate Education & Sustainability - Climate Education & Sustainability
Religious Education - Religious Education
Behaviour & Relationships - Behaviour & Relationships