Dolphin School aims to find and release children’s potential in academic work, creative endeavor, and sporting pursuit, and to develop their character according to a Christian understanding of what it means to be human. In so doing, it endeavors to prepare its pupils securely for the personal and intellectual challenges of the entrance to secondary school.
The information in this section aims to give parents considering sending their children to Dolphin School a comprehensive overview of the school. We see the school as a place of safety when life’s storms buffet us and a secure base from which to view the wonders of the world. Whilst your children are with us, we commit to look after them well and to teach them to look after themselves, each other, the wider community, and the planet.
A school is an intricate web of relationships with strands running in all directions between the Governors, the Principal, staff, parents, and pupils. Dolphin School’s Christian ethos places these relationships at the heart of school life. We keep our classes small so that we can personalize your child’s learning. Our starting point is knowing, and we aim to get to know your child deeply: his/her strengths and weaknesses, joys and triumphs, fears and concerns, gifts and talents. How does he/she learn best?
We can’t start to learn until we know and accept ourselves. One of our first jobs is to encourage children to value themselves and their gifts so that they can, in turn, learn to value the gifts of others. This will lead to a peaceful community, which forms the right context for learning. We are all different, and we learn differently. Our job is to try many keys as we seek to unlock your child’s potential.
Now, from a place of peace, within the context of love, your child is ready to leap into Dolphin School life. He/she is ready to dare to have a go, to risk a wrong answer, to try ideas out. He/she is ready to seize every chance to grow and learn. He/she is ready to face the challenges of life in a community, to grasp every learning opportunity that he/she is given, to ask questions, and to wrestle with answers.
Education is a journey, and each journey begins with a single step – in this case, the first step through the school door. One step must necessarily follow another as the pupil progresses, guided by his/her teachers, through a series of attainable targets over seven years. Then he/she leaves through that same door, ready to face the challenges of secondary school and life beyond.
What sort of a journey is this? It is a steady journey of seven stepping stones. The journey is safe because the child always has a guide, a teacher whose face is turned both towards the child (in concern and care) and towards the destination (the end of each academic year, the end of primary school, and life beyond). Though safe, it is necessarily challenging. There are steep climbs, rocky patches, peaceful glades, dense forests, open meadows, beautiful views – for each child these come at different moments, but the guide is always there, always ready to help and support. As each stepping stone is reached, the child feels a great sense of achievement (‘I gave it my best and look where I got!’), greeting the completed target with satisfaction and straining forward with ambition and aspiration.
Certain conditions make traveling enjoyable and achievable. Children need enough sleep to travel well each day. They need times of rest, time to enjoy the view. They cannot travel hard all day, all evening and all weekend. Children need applauding as they travel, however far they get.
