Extracurricular Activities

Extracurricular activities enrich children’s experience and allow them to develop their talents and interests. The practicalities of providing these opportunities are, however, a challenge for most schools i.e. reliance on teachers’ goodwill to run the activities, the shortage of time for activities at lunchtimes, the travel problems involved if children stay on after school for activities.

At Yavneh College, we overcome these problems by timetabling extracurricular activities for KS3 pupils into the school day as a 40-minute ‘Enrichment Programme’ immediately after lunch on Mondays to Thursdays, thus ensuring that all pupils and teachers are involved. Each term, pupils select new activities from the list of enrichment activities. Pupils therefore take 12 enrichment activities each year.

Most of the activities are mixed-age i.e. available to pupils in Years 7, 8 and 9. Having mixed-age activities fosters communication and friendship between the year groups, which in turn helps to reduce the likelihood of bullying.

Currently, the Enrichment Programme offers the following activities:

In addition to the KS3 Enrichment Programme, we offer all pupils a wide range of extracurricular activities, including school productions (My Fair Lady in 2007, Les Misérables in 2008, High School Musical in 2009, Evita in 2010, Bugsy Malone, 2011), school concerts, gliding, theatre trips, competitions, a host of informal Jewish activities (described in more detail in the Jewish Studies Department section of this website) and a packed programme of after-school sports activities ranging from football and netball to fencing, self-defence and cheerleading.

Our extracurricular programme has been highlighted as good practice in Hertfordshire Local Authority’s Inform magazine and has been commended by Ofsted:

‘Every student opts into a vast range of enrichment activities. These activities contribute enormously to students’ excellent personal development.’ (Ofsted report, May 2008)