We are a Christian school that serves a diverse community and works in partnership with parents to develop the whole child. This is a very important time for the school as we attempt to improve the flow of information to all our parents as well as helping you to harness opportunities to further the learning of your children.
Our passion is to educate the whole child. We value the importance of academic excellence but we seek excellence in all spheres of life whether that be spiritual, artistic, sporting, or service to the community. We achieve this by having a dedicated team that works closely together to understand the strengths of all our children and crucially welcome the partnership of parents to ensure we are successful with all our children.
One of the advantages of being in a small school is that core understanding and partnership is so much easier to foster – we say that as someone whose previous role was in a 3 form entry school where that was very difficult to achieve. We look towards innovations to create a mindset of constant improvement and also are fiercely protective of the good things that we already do.
We believe that working in partnership to develop the whole child is our core mission and this is why we have developed our curriculum which links as many different subjects into one core learning quest per half-term. This enables us to think of our reading and writing priorities as we are learning about science, history, geography, etc. rather than teaching them in isolation. Some subjects such as maths remain outside of this unless there is an obvious link. In the last year alone we achieved quality marks for International School Status, Geography, Science, and Inclusion for which we have been recommended to become a center of excellence.
At St. Luke’s we are embarking on a new curriculum. Each class will have a topic that will last for each half term. There will be six topics across the year, each with a various focus. The topics have been designed to link the various topics that are taught across each year group in science, geography, history, and citizenship. These subjects will provide the stimulus for work in literacy, art, and DT. All work will be placed within one book which will showcase the child’s ‘learning journey through each topic.
Our ‘whole child’ approach means achieving a fifth ‘Green Flag’ in our eco status that places us in the top 100 schools in the country for a sustainable approach to ecology. It also means us attaining the ‘Gold’ standard for our participation in a borough sports tournament and the co-ordinator of sports asking us the question, ‘How are you outperforming schools that are much larger than yours?’ The answer is the passion for sporting development within the staff several of whom have coached top-grade children’s sport and some have done so in a professional capacity. This approach runs parallel with a determination to open up new sports to our children which saw our KS2 children taking part in fencing, lacrosse, and archery last year in addition to the more obvious core sports.
Our staff is working incredibly hard to keep improving this wonderful school that has a thread of service and excellence going back 150 years to our original covenant to serve the people of this area: a covenant that is cherished and protected by our governing body.
