Welcome to Yester Primary School. You might expect the school to be Gifford Primary School after the village, but both the Church and the School have the same name Yester from Ystrad meaning a valley.
The present school opened on 16 April, 1968 at which time many of the smaller schools in the area were closed. These were in Bolton, Morham, Garvald and Longyester. From that time the pupils from these areas have been brought to Yester Primary by bus.
Today we have a huge catchment area. Many of the pupils stay in the small villages or remote farm cottages and school is their only meeting place.
We try to create a positive and happy atmosphere in school, maintaining and developing an ethos for learning. The children are always busy and active allowing their individual strengths to be developed.
This section of our site should help you find out the facts you need. Check out the menus to navigate to the page you want. Please contact us if you can’t find what you’re looking for. For the basic facts about our school, read on…
Our vision is:
Nurturing Learning and People
Our values are:
Included Supported Successful
Our aims are:
We are proud of our school and community.
We care about everyone in our school.
We encourage each other to do our very best in everything.
We learn in a way that suits us best.
Our school roll goes up and down each year, but is generally somewhere between 170 and 190. The number of children in each class is as follows:
There is a nursery class which operates two sessions. There are places for 20 pupils on four mornings from Monday-Thursday (4-5 years olds) and 20 pupils on four afternoons and Friday mornings (3-4 year olds). The nursery is staffed by 3 nursery practitioners. There are another 9 teachers responsible for the P1-7 pupils. These include the head teacher, principal teacher and a part-time support for learning teacher. There are seven classes. These may be single stream classes or composite classes. The head teacher does not have a class commitment.
Each class teacher has his or her classroom. Some classrooms have the unique feature of an added work-bay. There is a large hall with a spacious general purpose room and attractive library through a partition which can be opened to make a much larger area. A stage, also employed as our dining area, is used for our school productions and class assemblies.
There is wheelchair access to all areas of the school and a disabled toilet.
There is a kitchen on the premises where meals are provided for children from a three choice system. Children we welcome to bring their own packed lunches.
The grounds are spacious. There is a large tarmac area marked out for mini-basketball and netball, and many playground games. We have created a garden at the front entrance to the school which provides a quiet area for children to sit and enjoy, and we have planted a small woodland. Pupils regularly tend the flower borders around the car park. Our willow sculpture is a very popular place to play in at break-times. At the bottom of the tarmac area is our nursery garden which has been carefully arranged by nursery staff and pupils. All round the school is a large grass area. On the flat part we have a football pitch and there are goal posts for taking out at break times. We also have access to the local community woods.