Our School Vision and Values:

Our Church School is a warm and welcoming place where everyone is valued. The open, friendly atmosphere provides a secure and safe environment where all can succeed. We foster positive attitudes, good social skills and an enthusiasm for learning, embraced by the Christian framework. Through discussion with our children, parents/grandparents and staff we selected 8 values we feel our school community represents. These 8 values are: Happiness , Peace , Truth, Respect, Teamwork, Dedication , Trust and Love.

At Stanley St Andrew’s Church of England School, we have a daily act of collective worship as a whole school. This is an opportunity for us to come together as a school community to sing, listen to stories, take part in drama, reflect, and pray together.

Children and staff spend time together to plan and deliver Collective Worship throughout the school year. The year 6 children take on different roles within school the team is made up of pupil voice director, eco director and collective worship directors. The collective worship directors help to plan, arrange, and lead all worship in school and in our St Andrew’s church.

Throughout the year we hold major services such as: Harvest, Christmas, Easter, Mothering Sunday, and the year 6 Leavers' Service in church. Our directors and children are central in these events as they write prayers, complete Bible readings, and write their own order of service. When we worship in St Andrew’s Church we welcome our parents, grandparents, friends, and local community to join us and be part of the experience.

We have strong links with St Andrew’s church however, we are still waiting for a vicar to replace Reverend Gill. Rev Ingrid, who has been a school governor, supporting us for over 6 years helps to keep our strong links as a church school. Rev Ingrid has moved location, however; she still is a close contact and will often travel to lead collective worship for our school. In addition to this support Rev Jan Hutchinson is standing in to guide the 6-church schools in the parish. Rev Jan happily leads our main services in church to support our school. Along with Rev Jan we have actively found Rev Christine and Father Julius from Kirk Hallam parish who are supporting us to ensure that our children have strong links with clergy and to support their spiritual development. As you can see, having strong links with clergy, St Andrew’s church and the Dioceses are fundamental to who we are.

Christian values are embedded in our curriculum and in everything we do within our school life. The adults in school embrace the Christian values and model to our children how to treat each other and to include everyone in all that we do. Through the school’s Christian ethos, children are provided with lots of opportunities to acknowledge and enhance their spirituality. There are also lots of opportunities for prayer, reflection, and silence during times of worship and throughout the school day. Children are invited to use the ECO area and prayer area to appreciate God’s beautiful world, write prayers or have time for silence and or reflection.

Spirituality

It is difficult to put into words what ‘spirituality’ is because it is a very personal experience. It differs from person to person, and often spirituality changes within people during their lifetime. Spirituality is different from having a religion or faith; a person can be spiritual without having a particular faith.

Spirituality is not something we can see; but we know that it is there because sometimes we can feel it inside ourselves or indeed in someone else. Our spiritual being includes those awe and wonder moments, the asking of big questions, inspiration and being aware of something ‘bigger’ outside of ourselves.

As a school, we have used the work of Liz Mills ideology to help support our understanding of spirituality. The language we use to define spirituality is not child-friendly, so when talking to children about it we will refer to:

The ideology behind the image of the doughnuts.

Doughnuts have been used to help our children understand. Having unpicked the tricky words: whole, holey, and wholly. The children have focused on the hole in the middle of the doughnut and what that means to them. The bit that cannot be seen but we know that makes us who we are. We have had time to think about that precious middle and how that can impact upon us as individuals. (Body, mind, and spirit), with the precious holy middle holey, windows and cameras

The ideology behind the image of the Ladders

Spiritual development discussed that we can all be at different levels within our spiritual development. Although we may experience the same set of ladders, we may be at different heights depending on where we are on the journey.

The ideology behind the image of a Camera

This image links to the fact that we can all look at the same view but capture different things within our spiritual development. Therefore, spiritual development can look very different once it has been processed.

A sense of awe and wonder

Children are born curious, and it is our duty to nurture this natural inquisitiveness and guide them towards looking at the world and noticing, with awe and wonder, the natural and man-made delights all around us. We want to encourage them to ask ‘big questions’ about life, religion, nature, science, and any other areas of fascination.

Care for nature and living things.

We provide many opportunities for children to learn about nature and the role they play in protecting our world. As a Church School, this is especially important. We have invested and developed our ECO garden and outdoor areas to ensure that our children have the opportunity to a plant, feed the birds and harvest a range of foods. Children have worked hard to achieve the Green flag alongside learning about how we can protect our world.

Love

Love is one of our school values. We encourage our children to love one another just as Jesus loved us. We are a caring school, who pride ourselves of our ethos of family. Through our Christian Values, we teach children to care for friends, family, and the community. Our curriculum includes learning about those we love and who love us.

Children’s spiritual development is fostered through all aspects of our provision. It is about the relationships and the values that we consider to be important, as well as the development of knowledge, concepts, skills, and attitudes. We give children opportunities to:

• Begin to develop their own system of beliefs which may or may not include religious beliefs.
• Express their personal beliefs and compare their views with others, sharing their feelings and opinions through discussions and stories.
• Experience a love of learning through rewarding their enthusiasm and by encouraging exploratory play and learning.
• Experience and reflect on situations, stories, music, art, dance, and drama.
• Reflect upon the world around them and show a sense of awe and wonder towards aspects of the natural world or human achievement.

Collective worship begins with the lighting of candles, to remind us of the Trinity that God is three persons in one. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The items on our worship table remind us of each person of the Trinity:

The Bible, God’s word helps us to think about God the father.

The cross helps us to think about God the son, Jesus Christ.

The candle helps us to think about the Holy Spirit, God’s presence around us.

We have been learning about spirituality it is a really difficult concept for us to explain. So we have created our own doughnuts to try and focus on the precious hole in our doughnut. Some of us found this a challenge take a look at our creations.

By clicking on the link below you will be able to see our school policies including our, Spirituality policy, Collective Worship policy and RE policy.

By clicking on the link below you can meet our entire staff team who all contribute to our amazing school community.

Please see our school newsletters by clicking the link below.

Pauline Latham our local MP came to visit our school and join our Yr6 children during Collective Worship. We received an amazing book voucher of a £100 from Pauline as well as supporting our investigations of building a school library.

The children really enjoyed the visit from Pauline learning about parliament and choosing new books for school as well as enjoying reading them .

Thank you Pauline Latham for your support and promotion of a love for reading!

Our Eco committee arranged for the whole school to hold an Eco fundraising day which consisted of a non-uniform day which raised £ 110 that went towards plants, plant pots and herbs for our top playground.

Well done to our Eco committee for arranging and organising this as well as a huge thank you to the children who look after the plants.

Please see below a link to our Eco page to discover our fantastic Eco committee and all of the achievements we have achieved through their leadership.

Governing body:

Below are some of the recent discussions taken part in our Governor meetings:

What makes us different to a community primary school?

Value of worship even more apparent feedback children really missed the whole school worship.

Holding worship at heart of everything we do.

DG advised that we have been monitoring collective worship and found that our children have been keeping up with this and have enjoyed taking part with this at home.

LJ added that we also have our Easter prayer and Easter garden competition which is running.

ESW advised that we have given all of our children a rainbow badge of hope as a reminder that they belong to a church school and that however dark their world may seem, there is always hope. ESW added that the children really love their badges and we have had some nice responses to these from a handful of parents.

ESW advised that for her it was that the Christian ethos is really apparent and is acted out by all of our staff and children. Behaviour is really good, and staff have put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that our children are really clear about our rules and expectations which has had a massive impact.

DG suggested that seeing the children take part in collective worship on the playground and their visual disappointment when it is raining and can’t take place is evidence of our difference to a community school. ESW added that one of the things children missed most in lockdown is worship and they are still missing worship through song. NW commented that worship is one of the things that will stick in their minds when they are adults.

Foss ( Friends of Stanley School, or Stanley St Andrew’s PTA):

Please click the link below to see the amazing support and work our FOSS ( Friends of Stanley School, or Stanley St Andrew’s PTA) put in to support our whole school community.