Based on Jesus’ words:
‘I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.’
(John 10:10)
Our vision is that our school is a place where people are:
‘Believing and Achieving Together to be the Best that We Can Be’
Our Heart Values
H – hope
E – empathy
A – achievement
R – reflection
T – thankfulness
Our values are the elements we identify as enabling us to get there, to create the environment in our school community and culture.
A HEART represents love, it also represents courage, the centre of something, the key part….. The Bible talks about hearts a lot – in Ezekiel 11:19 there are two different kinds of heart referenced – a heart of stone (hatred), and a heart of flesh (love). As we lead with the value of love, we seek to nurture hearts of flesh in our school!
Our Values are HEART values – Hope, Empathy, Achievement, Reflection and Thankfulness, surrounded by God’s Love. It’s difficult to live these values if we don’t feel loved, so love is the greatest! We need to love ourselves and those around us to even begin to pursue our vision.
Hope – trusting that things will turn out well in the end. It helps us to explain why are we doing what we’re doing? What’s it all about in the end? This might be thinking about getting to the end of the week, the month, the year, or going to High School. It might be about becoming an adult, our dreams for our lives, or our whole life purpose. Having hope inspires us ‘to believe to be the best we can be’, to follow our dreams whole-heartedly! When we have hope in something that doesn’t depend on things always being perfect now, it helps us to face difficult challenges.
Empathy – being a good friend, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, enables us to forgive and say sorry, to serve others without expecting something in return, to be kind (to treat other people how we would like to be treated), to show respect to others, being willing to ask for help or give it! Building good relationships in this way enables us to fulfil the ‘together’ part of our vision.
Achievement – the fruit of following our values and part of our vision ‘achieving’ – a range of different ways we can achieve- academically, socially, spiritually, physically, emotionally, mentally….a sense of achievement helps us to remember we are valued, we have a purpose, we can change, we can grow and get better at things.
Reflection – thinking about our experiences – what was good? What could be better? Learning from my mistakes, involving other people too – helping each other reflect on strengths and things to develop. Helping us learn as we grow in being ‘the best we can be’.
Thankfulness – an attitude of gratitude – identifying what we’re grateful for what we do have really helps us to deal with what we don’t have, or helps us to wait for other things. Helps us to identify and value everything and everyone who is a part of us pursuing ‘being the best we can be’ – enabling us to truly ‘believe’ we can achieve it!
Every Bible story points to Jesus in a different way and highlights different Christian values. We present our Year 6 leavers with a Bible so they can use the book as a ‘toolkit for life’ and use their knowledge and understanding of the book to signpost themselves and others to the stories that are relevant and can offer guidance at different parts of their life and in different circumstances, continuing the vision of being the best they can be.
We seek to preserve and develop the school’s Christian ethos in accordance with the principles and practice of the Church of England https://www.churchofengland.org/ . We ask parents to respect our ethos and its importance to the school community.
