Opportunities for students to build their resilience, confidence and independence

Our school values naturally encourage character development as they are characteristics that are necessary to succeed in life.  As such, opportunities present daily as a part of the curriculum.  For example, in English.

We have chosen challenging texts throughout KS3 to develop resilient readers as well as critical thinkers. Going beyond this in our curriculum choices and range of texts studied, we have our own ‘minimum literary entitlement’ which ensures students have a broad knowledge of the canon combined with writers of minority / marginalised groups to expand their world view.  The cultural diet our students are offered is important to us; it establishes an empathetic and understanding nature by exposing them to a multitude of ideas, feelings and different cultures that they may not have experienced. It is more than reading, it is deepening a person’s emotional and cultural intellect and thus developing character.

Our values of ambition and resilience actively encourage students to realise that learning rarely occurs without perseverance; initial misconceptions and mistakes are often crucial to the learning process.  Our data from the last academic year shows achievement points were distributed as follows: Ambition 48%, Pride 11%, Resilience 11%, Respect 6% and Responsibility 24%.  Whilst we would like resilience to be higher this is a positive incremental step, as such a high distribution for ‘ambition’ demonstrates that learners are more prepared to push themselves beyond their comfort zone than previously, which means to succeed resilience will be required.

Beyond the taught curriculum our enrichment programme and student leadership group provide opportunities for students to develop character and interpersonal skills.  Non-uniform days are used to raise money for local charities, charities chosen by the students.  For example, our next day in October will support a student in Year 8 who is swimming Windermere to raise money for a local cancer charity.  In the canteen each day is a daily debate; the question is used to encourage students to think about how our school values link to daily life, but also to express their opinion about current affairs.