Welcome to St John Fisher Catholic Primary School

We have uploaded some key information below to help you get a feel for our school. You are very welcome to book a school tour with the office and we'll be happy to show you around if you're considering a place here. We have open evenings on Wednesday 25th October 2023, Wednesday 8th November 2023 and Wednesday 22nd November 2023 all at 4:00pm. If you can't make these dates and would like to arrange an alternative, please contact the school office on 0121 475 3489.  

Choosing the right setting for your child is so important and we want you to feel as well informed as you can be about our wonderful school. We would love to speak with you personally and give you the opportunity to ask any questions you may have about life here at St John Fisher. If you are interested in our school, then please call the school office on 0121 475 3489. We will ask you for your contact details and arrange a call back with you to introduce ourselves and give you the opportunity to ask any specific questions you might have.

If you are choosing our school please read the admissions criteria along with the relevant dates for applications. You can find an additional information form on our admissions page. This must be filled in and handed in to school with evidence of Baptism, if your child is baptised. This is in addition to the application you will make through the local authority. You’ll find full details of our admissions criteria under the admissions tab or by clicking below.

Thanks so much for taking the time to explore our school! Please do take a look at our information below and we look forward to speaking with you soon.

Mrs Rogers

Principal

Welcome to St John Fisher school!

My Name is Mrs Rogers and I’m the Headteacher here at St John Fisher Catholic Primary School. I have been here at St John Fisher for the last 18 years, I can honestly say I love coming here every day and the amazing family feel we have in our school. We have incredible children here, who we are extremely proud of. Our children achieve well because there is an excellent partnership between our school and our families, and we make sure our children feel happy and safe at all times. We have a wonderful staff team who would also love to meet you but for the purpose of this virtual school tour I’ll introduce you to the key members of staff for our Reception class.

This is Miss Musto, she is our Deputy Head and is also our lead for Safeguarding. She has been here at St John Fisher for the last 20 years. She is the main point of contact for family support and also any additional needs as she is also the school SENCO. She is very approachable and a wealth of information where it comes to finding additional support for a child or their family.

This is Miss Hickey, she is our Reception class teacher and has been here with our school for 13 years, almost all of that time has been in our Reception class. All of the children in our school currently have been lucky enough to have had Miss Hickey as their Reception class teacher. She is such a caring and kind member of our team, just perfect for settling the youngest members of our school family into their school life.

We have a large reception classroom and a great outdoor space too. The children free flow between indoor and outdoor activities. The reception toilets are inside the classroom so they can use them whenever they need to without having to go wandering down any corridors. We have a great forest area and a lovely climbing fame too which the children enjoy every day. 

All of our classrooms are bright and spacious – here is our year 1 class an example to show you. All of our classroom walls are used to support learning as well as celebrate pupil’s efforts.

Each class also has a very special prayer area that is used for collective worship and daily prayers.

This is our junior playground. Its huge! From the front of the school you can’t really appreciate how much space we have at the back or in fact that we also have two upstairs classrooms for our year 3 and 4 too.

We have a lovely prayer garden which is used by the whole school for outdoor collective worship, as well as personal prayer when needed.

We have a KS2 forest area, we have a fire pit and enjoy using this place with the children for outdoor learning throughout the year.

This is our climbing frame for children in years 2-6. The school council designed this, you won't find it anywhere else! The children love burning off some energy on here at playtimes.

Wrap Around Care

We have great wrap around care available at St John Fisher. We have an outside provider called Fit4Sport who runs our breakfast club. Children can arrive at school from 7:30am if they’re part of this group.

We run our own after school provision with our school staff. Children really enjoy this and can stay until 5:30pm

All children in reception and Key Stage 1 are provided with a free school meal. We usually have a 3 week rolling menu of hot meals to choose from. If your child doesn’t like a menu choice they can also choose a sandwich for particular days if you let us know in advance. Our menus are published on the website. I would really encourage you to take up the hot meal, it’s well balanced and free of charge for all children in reception and key stage one. It often encourages the children to explore new things when they see their friends trying new foods and its one less thing to get ready before you leave the house in the morning!

The children in our school spend 10% of their curriculum time learning RE as a Catholic school. We’re really proud of the children’s knowledge and understanding in RE. They very quickly pick up the daily prayers we say in school and will attend Mass with us at least once a month at either St John Fisher Church or here in the school hall.  You can find some more about information about the Catholic life of our school, here on the website.

You can also find our most recent Section 48 inspection for RE and Catholic life here. The school was graded as 'outstanding' and 'good' in the three judgement areas.

Our most recent OFSTED report notes 'Warm, respectful relationships are evident between adults and pupils. Pupils behave well in lessons and around school. They are polite to each other, staff and visitors. Pupils know that, if they have a worry, there is always a trusted adult to talk to.' We are incredibly proud of our children and we invest time in helping them to understand the wider world and the role they can play in it. The report mentions 'Pupils at St John Fisher are being incredibly well prepared for life in their local community, in Birmingham and the wider world. Staff, pupils and parents could not speak more highly of the school. One parent, voicing the views of many, said, ‘This is a safe and caring school community. We feel blessed that our children attend here.’

Please click the link below to read the full report.

Our school is part of the ‘Lumen Christi’ Multi Academy Company. We work really closely with our local Catholic schools within Lumen Christi– these schools are

St James

St Brigid

St Joseph

St Columba

St Paul

St Thomas More

St Thomas Aquinas

Here at St John Fisher we LOVE READING! We made a huge investment into high quality reading materials. We had a full replacement of our library books recently. We have the latest titles as well as the classics to choose from and the children’s love for reading in our school is just incredible.

We have also purchased a fantastic new reading scheme. This is closely matched to our delivery of phonics and the children and their families are really enjoying these books. Our phonics results are consistently strong every year due to a well-established system, high quality teaching and strong partnership with our families.

This is our school hall, we use this space for assemblies, Mass, lunch and PE. We also usually have a range of after school sporting activities for children from years 1-6 to get involved with too.

During our weekly merit assemblies, we have awards for children from each class which are based on the Jesuit Virtues for the half term. This half term we are trying to be ‘curious and active’. We also have one special award for our mission ambassador. This is given to a child that truly lives out the mission of our school which is ‘Together with Christ; we love lean and pray as one family’. We have weekly house points across the school too. All of which are celebrated in our Friday assembly and form part of the weekly newsletter.

Weekly newsletters are a good place to explore in order to get a feel for typical school life, ours can be found on the link below. It might be a good idea to look back at letters from last year which were pre-pandemic to see what a typical week looks like and we pray that by the time your little ones start their school journey we’ll be back to something like this! We also have a school app which can be downloaded too. This is how you will receive messages straight to your devices from us.

Information on our school uniform can be found on our website or by clicking here…

We feel our children look super smart in their green uniform every day, I’m sure you’ll agree.

We have lots of ways for children to get involved in extracurricular activities. We have numerous sporting teams and enter into lots of competitions and events. Some of these include both girls and boys football tournaments, rugby matches, tchouckball competitions and cross country races.

We have a ‘Mini Vinnies’ Group that is currently based with our older children, however the whole school gets involved in the projects they lead. This is a branch of the SVP and is about turning concern into action. Last year, our Mini Vinnies were passionate about tackling poverty in the UK. They looked at uniform poverty and supported a local uniform charity by taking part in a ‘coatathon’ collection for winter coats. They wrote to Downing Street to campaign for a fair approach to uniform grants. They have also collected toiletries and energy bars for the homeless in the city centre and made Christmas cards and Easter cards too. These special gifts, along with their well wishes, are then delivered to those on the streets of Birmingham, by our staff team on the children’s behalf. These children are quite simply amazing and their passion for speaking out about injustice and making a difference is admirable – we are so proud of them and we love having a Mini Vinnies group to drive us all.

We have a school council who look at ways that we can continually improve our school whether its buildings, behaviour or new ways of doing something. Our elected school councillors are highly valued and their contributions make a real difference! 

We simply can’t mention everything that is wonderful about our school on one web page but appreciate you reading this far! I’m sure you’ll have questions and we’ll be happy to answer them. Please leave your details with the school office on 0121 475 3489 and we will call you to have a chat and answer any queries you may have.

We really look forward to speaking with you and hopefully welcoming you to our school family.