It is vitally important to broaden children’s’ horizons beyond the classroom: activities that extend children's learning through new experiences and opportunities develop children’s character and prepare them for the future, and their understanding of equality and diversity.

Extra-curricular clubs aim to increase opportunities for our children and provide further enhancement to the daily school curriculum.  These activities contribute to the development of the children’s character by enabling them to show various personal skills including determination, teamwork and striving for excellence, as well as promoting our key characteristics of being respectful, resilient, honest, determined, confident, cooperative and ambitious. At Hindley Junior and Infant School, we pride ourselves on offering an extensive range of extra-curricular clubs and enrichment activities that run throughout the year to ALL children.

After school enrichment clubs.
Most extra-curricular clubs are run by school staff with some delivered by external providers.  School staff enjoy spending time and building relationships with pupils in the various clubs they deliver. Pupils benefit from working and cooperating with different children and social skills improve. Pupils attending clubs develop in confidence and their sense of belonging within Hindley Junior and Infant School is strengthened.  We celebrate attendance at our clubs with various awards during our celebration assemblies.
We involve our pupils in determining many of the clubs and enrichment opportunities on offer on a termly basis by listening to their ideas and views through the school council forum. Despite the current limitations due to COVID safety precautions, we are still managing to offer children a variety of afterschool clubs: the clubs are run in class bubbles. We currently have a range of clubs available to ALL children: 

Trips and visitors.
The school curriculum is also enhanced and enriched by several school trips throughout the year. Also, visitors are invited into school to enhance the curriculum and broaden children’s horizons. Each year the Year 6 children have the opportunity to attend an outdoor and adventurous residential trip. In addition to these trips and visitors linked to the curriculum, it is vitally important to broaden children’s horizons and expose them to experiences that they may not normally experience, such as watching live sporting and artistic events.

Opportunities to represent the school
It is inarguably accepted that a bit of healthy competition in any field is known to enhance motivation and generate increased effort from those competing. The sporting field is no exception to this rule. At Hindley junior and Infant school we encourage our children to participate in sporting competitions amongst themselves and with other schools and the wider community. We try to participate in as many inter-school sports competitions as we can, as well as giving all children several opportunities to compete in intra-school (against their classmates) competitions. Competing in sporting competitions and representing the school against others has many benefits: encourages higher standards of achievement,  encourages physical activity, builds discipline, teaches how to cope with setbacks and build resilience and empathy and builds camaraderie and cooperation.  

We also encourage our children to compete against other schools in non-sporting settings too: we host an annual Maths Quiz for local schools and also participate in singing events/competitions.