Our Three Pillars That Build Success

As a school our aim is to provide every student with a “Firm Foundation for Future Success”. We seek to achieve this through 3 principles (or Pillars) which underpin all our work:

Support: Creating a community and learning environment that enables every individual to reach their full potential.
Inspire: Embedding an ethos of excellence in our teaching and learning to deliver the highest possible outcomes.
Thrive: Equipping all students with knowledge, skills and cultural capital, allowing them to flourish through multiple paths in life, making a significantly positive contribution to society.

Each of these foundational principles (or pillars) is reinforced by:

Core Values: We place emphasis on a traditional ethos, recognizing the importance of promoting a strong set of core values that include tolerance and respect, politeness, good manners, a smart appearance, an industrious work ethic and a generosity of spirit. This ensures a purposeful and inclusive learning environment. Our House system promotes collaboration and teamwork alongside rivalry and competitiveness. Students have the chance to gain House ties, Half-Colours and Full Colours through a system that mirrors a job application, where they have to demonstrate and evidence achievement across a broad range of success criteria.
Academic Excellence: Staff deliver exciting, engaging and varied teaching and learning through a system of four lessons of 75 minutes each every day. Every student has an iPad, preloaded with selected educational apps that are used by teachers to accelerate student progress. There is an emphasis on the development of investigative, problem-solving, presentation and team-work skills. Opportunities are sought to allow each student to experience success and from this to build self-esteem, enabling them to flourish.
Personal Development: The school operates an extended day every Thursday, with five lessons, and in which the additional lesson is devoted to high quality personal development activities that deliver a very broad range of important life and employability skills. These sessions include, for example, the Duke of Edinburgh Award (at all levels), debating, gardening, conversational languages, book groups, engineering, dance, photography and much, much more. Each student takes a new activity each term. Over 7 years at the school they can seriously enhance their personal portfolio or CV. All this is in addition to the broad range of trips, clubs and activities on offer.

Embedding Our Pillars Throughout School

We are in the process of embedding these principles throughout school via a series of inspirational posters. The posters encourage students to consider not only how these principles apply to their lives in school but also appreciate the difference they can make once they leave us and move on to their chosen next steps.

We have created 3 ‘word clouds’ based on each of the 3 principles – Support, Inspire, Thrive. You can see each of the clouds below, along with a more accessible list of the words contained within them.

Over time we will produce a series of inspirational quotes from key figures in the current world, as well as from history, which also capture the essence of our principles of Support, Inspire and Thrive.