User:Brunnian/userfied article Bourne Westfield Primary School

Bourne Westfield Primary School is situated off Westbourne Park, Bourne, Lincolnshire, England. It has a roll of 629. The school participates in the Lincolnshire tradition of agriculture and horticulture,. The school was built on Westfield, the site of an existing three-field crop rotation system, dating from the Middle Ages and associated with Car Dyke which may have been used for drainage or crop transport.

A November 2008 Ofsted inspection accorded the school a Grade 1 (outstanding).

Description
Built in the 1960s as part of the large expansion of housing to the west of the town, it has been twice enlarged to cope with increasing rolls. Some former pupils of the school are now scattered worldwide, as far as Australia. The school hosts its own pre-school facility, the Bluebird Pre-school Playgroup.

Awards
As of 2009, the school is an award holder in the schools section of the Clean Air Awards Scheme, under the auspices of Lincolnshire County Council. It was cited as a Flagship School for the Food for Life Partnership 2009 to 2010 achieving a bronze award, partly with respect to its cookery club. In 2010 it won Best School Garden in the East Midlands and a gold medal with Britain in Bloom. In 2009 the school had won a silver gilt medal in the same competition. This was one of the first schools to be rated as a National Healthy School in the programme of the same name; it has been given the gold award for the quality and range of its sports provision under the Active Mark Scheme. A pupil at the school received The Local's Rose Award in 2009 for caring for his mother during illness.

Charity and community work
Local respect was demonstrated in 2008 for this school's educational and fundraising work, when its school fete received a flypast by a Spitfire and Dakota. In 2007 and 2008, pupils filled 200 shoe boxes with gifts for needy children as part of the Operation Christmas Child appeal. Pupils continue charity work outside the school; for example a pupil has contributed to the local newspaper's appeal to send gift boxes to military personnel serving abroad.

Agriculture and horticulture
In response to Bourne's tradition of agriculture and Lincolnshire's horticulture, and to its site and environment as detailed below, the school has its own gardening clubs and grows its own vegetables. It has organised voluntary maintenance of public flower beds in Bourne by pupils since 2009. An orchard has been donated to the school, and this has been maintained by the pupils with the aim of provision of some fruit to the school.

Domestic science
Besides the Food for Life partnership award and the cookery club as mentioned above, the pupils cook pancakes for the Pancake Day celebrations.

Music
The school has a choir which also sings in Bourne Methodist Church. The choir has performed at local public events, such as the turning on of the Christmas lights in Bourne in 2007, and charity events such as the Bourne Round Table dinner for pensioners in 2008.

Sport and physical exercise
As Lincolnshire champions and as representative of the East Midlands, the school's rugby team reached the finals of the Tag 2 Twickenham rugby tournament and competed at Rugby School in Warwickshire in 2009. Cycling has been supported by the school, with a six-week Go-Ride cycling skills programme taking place in 2008. Some pupils from the school take part in other sports such as motocross and skateboarding; a pupil asked the council for a local skatepark in 2002, and the idea was being resurrected by the council as of 2010. One pupil won three gold medals in the Cambridgeshire Gymnastics floor and vault competition in 2008.

Westfield archaeological site
The school was built on the site of Westfield. Between the 9th and 20th centuries, Westfield was a set of three fields arranged as and used as an existing medieval agricultural three-field system, which was a form of crop rotation in use from the Middle Ages. It is this site which accounts for the name of the school. On Google Earth, the 2010 aerial photograph of the school playing field at 52°46′08″N; 0°23′19.23″W shows cropmarks which may indicate the archaeological site of these three fields. The site is close to and associated with Car Dyke, and this may imply a connection between the three-field system and the dyke, involving drainage, irrigation and transport of crops and materials. The historical association between Westfield and Car Dyke for crop and materials transport is a strong probability because droving roads and the later turnpikes were less viable than waterways until the A151 road was built. In the tradition of UK primary schools, the pupils are taught geography and history in the context of the school's site environment as well as contemporary and worldwide context. That is to say, the school's site and environment directly affects the education of the pupils.

School buildings
The original modern building was created in 1963 by a team of architects in Lincolnshire Council's building department. It would have been a flat-roofed building. Since then, there has been a series of extensions which are now fused to form a cohesive unit. The most recent two projects on the site were designed by Wilson and Heath of Stamford, who built a covered courtyard and library at the school. This architectural firm has worked on Fishmongers Hall in London and the University of Exeter, and has won a civic award in Stamford. Two more classrooms and a covered way are now being planned by the school, which is again using the same architects.