Lowick and Holy Island Church of England First Schools

Vision, Values & Ethos

Our Vision is:

Journeying Together

"Be encouraged of heart and united in love..." (Col 2)

Our vision is that every member of our community is loved and cared for. All of us are created in the image of God, we are all precious and wonderful. Each person is nurtured to be the best they can be – thinking about the whole person.

We seek to support and encourage each other to help us to grow with the knowledge and skills we need to go anywhere we choose in life and be fulfilled. In this way, everyone is able to flourish and enjoy fullness of life.

As two schools, separated not only by distance, but sometimes by the North Sea, we are inspired by the Pauline letters of love and encouragement between small, scattered churches of early Christianity. Paul wrote to the Colossians 'be encouraged of heart and united in love' and we reflect on this regularly in school.

Journeying Together sums up our joint journey as federated schools, but it is also so much more than this. It speaks to our spiritual and learning journey within school as well as our journey with our wider community. We draw on our rich history of pilgrimage and the mission of the Lindisfarne Gospels to spread the Good News beyond Northumberland and out to the world. We seek to hold hands and journey with the wider world with links made nationally and internationally. The school works together as a strong team, we love to work with others and seek out strong partnerships near and far, we support global causes as well as local ones and remember that we are all family and we are all journeying together.

Children can articulate the living action of our Vision as our Golden Rule: 'treat others as you would like to be treated'. We also know that we should encourage and love each other and base our behaviour on that ideal. We know that many hearts build a school and, indeed, a community and a world.

Our Values and Ethos help us to foster a safe yet stimulating and challenging culture in which all individuals are valued, respected, nurtured, enthused and appropriately prepared for the ever changing world in which we live.

In order to realise our vision we aim:

To maintain a healthy, physically and emotionally safe and secure environment.
To promote respect and trust in self and others.
To promote collaborative teaching and learning thus valuing the opinions and perspective of all.
To value, nurture and celebrate the diversity of talent within our community and the wider world.
To promote a culture of creative thinking in an atmosphere where risk taking, experimentation and innovation encouraged thus embedding it in our practice.
To help all learners develop the strength of character and resilience to deal with life’s changes and challenges.
To celebrate success for its own sake to affirm and enable further achievement.
To promote high expectations of behaviour and learning through personalised target setting and pupil ownership.
To value the contributions of all stakeholders within the wider school community.
To nurture and enquiring mind and inspire a life long passion for and enjoyment of learning.
To provide opportunities for the children to reflect on issues which lie beyond the visible and material
We believe that the pupils of this school must be able to recognise and adapt to a society which is served by an increasing use of ICT related processes. To enable pupils to prepare for this we believe that all pupils must have equal and appropriate access to ICT resources.

The spiritual, moral, cultural, social and physical development in a church school will be based on Christian values such as love of neighbour, the pursuit of truth and justice, challenge of service and duty and the experience of forgiveness.