Recognising its historic foundation, St Aidan’s aims to serve its community by providing an education of the highest quality within the context of Christian belief and practice.
Vision
Inspire and prepare for life in all its fullness
Ethos
We warmly welcome children from all faiths, as well as those from non-faith backgrounds. Together, staff, children, parents and governors, endeavour to make our school a friendly place in which everybody feels valued.
Our approach is based on core values and we expect all children, staff and stakeholders (parents, carers and governing body members) to respect them.
Values
Our values are:
- community
- sustainability
- kindness
- resilience
- inclusiveness
- peace
There is a focus on each school value is studied for a half term each year.
British Values
Through our daily school life at St. Aidan’s, we encourage our children to build respectful friendships and demonstrate compassion towards others. Through this we build a strong community spirit. Our teaching and learning provides the children with the wisdom and endurance they need to expand their minds socially, morally and academically so allowing them to achieve and flourish and fulfil ‘Life in all its fullness.’ (John 10:10). We encourage our children to demonstrate and develop a dignity in their work and themselves which enables them to hope to aspire to be the best they can possibly be.
Our government believes that, ‘British society is founded on fundamental values and principles, which all those living in the UK should respect and support. These values are reflected in the responsibilities, rights and privileges of being a British citizen or permanent resident of the UK. They are based on history and traditions and are protected by law, customs and expectations. There is no place in British society for extremism or intolerance.’
The values we support are not unique to Britain and are shared by many people in the world represented by the diverse families which make up our school community.
We support the values of democracy, rules of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs and these are embedded within our curriculum and celebrated through our collective worship, so allowing the children to flourish, aspire and achieve. These values are found in our own school values identified by the children, staff, governors and parents as sustainability, kindness, resilience, peace, inclusiveness and community.
We plan Collective worship and our curriculum to teach the children about our values, respecting similarities and differences, tackling stereotypes and understanding why some people discriminate in order to develop our values of kindness, inclusiveness and community.
We aim to empower children to have a voice and to stand up against discrimination, valuing equality, tolerance and mutual respect. The staff team model our values in the manner we interact with children, parents and the wider school community.
As well as promoting British values we would actively challenge pupils, staff or parents expressing opinions contrary to fundamental British values, including ‘extremist’ views and principles.
