Our Community

St. Mary’s Primary School is part of a thriving community in the heart of Dunblane. A small, friendly school, our families get to know each other and our staff well.

We have strong links with St. Mary’s Episcopal Church – the Rector of St. Mary’s leads school assemblies and provides pastoral care for families and staff. The Church community runs regular ‘Messy Church’ activities after school, and these are open for school pupils to attend.

We encourage our pupils to take care of our wider community – for example through visits to the residents of Randolph Hill care home, or litter picking at Holmehill woodland. We also have links with Dunblane initiatives such as the Dementia Café.

St. Mary’s is part of the Dunblane Learning Community. We work with the other Dunblane primary schools and Dunblane High School to develop joint learning and sporting activities and to support the transition of Primary 7 children to secondary school.

Communicating with parents

Maintaining great communication between the school staff and the school community is really important to us. The staff team at St. Mary’s communicates regularly and often with our school families.

Our monthly newsletter is sent to every family by email, and via our school app. Using the school app, we share news, events and important messages and reminders.

Teachers communicate with parents/carers using ClassDojo, sharing photos and insights from the school day. Regular parent evenings are an opportunity for parents/carers to meet the class teacher, and to see what the children have been working on.

Community activities and fundraising

Lots of community and fundraising activities take place at St Mary’s throughout the year. These bring our parent body together, and connect our school community with our local community.

Our unmissable Christmas Fair in early December is a lovely start to the Christmas season with food, mulled wine/juice, games, raffle, tombola and the chance for children to visit Santa in his grotto. The whole community is welcome to enjoy this festive afternoon. In the weeks beforehand, our school crafting group works with every school class to create beautiful crafts and decorations to sell as gifts.

At the end of each academic year our families come together for our summer celebration, enjoying a BBQ, games and ceilidh dancing. The pupils v. parents football match is always a highlight!

Our annual community picnic in the school grounds is a chance for the school community and local community to get together over a picnic lunch. We also invite local residents to school for a Daffodil Tea at Easter, and have hosted the Memory Café together with St. Mary’s church.  School families also participate in the Kilt Walk and mini Kilt Walk.

In addition to these events, our fundraising team develops all sorts of smaller fundraising initiatives throughout the year.  The funds that we raise through school activities are used to support the development of the school, for example through the purchase of IT equipment such as interactive whiteboards and ipads.

We also hold regular fundraising activities in support of the wider community, including Start-Up Stirling’s Reverse Advent Calendar, annual Christmas shoebox appeals, and collections of clothes and toys in support of refugee charities.

Easyfundraising

Easyfundraising offers a brilliant way for you to support our school when you shop online. Please go to the Easyfundraising website, register, and search for St. Mary’s Episcopal Primary School – Dunblane. Every time you shop with registered online retailers, St. Mary’s will receive a percentage of the price of your order.