Vision and Values

During 2021-22, as a school community we conducted a consultation into our school vision and values, considering what is at the core of our purpose. This consultation process involved us gathering the views of staff, governors, parents and children. We thought carefully about the different aspects of our school – our location, context, the changing needs of our children and their families, and what we want our children to leave with at the end of their seven years at St Lawrence.

We decided on our new vision statement:

Shine Like Stars in the Universe

This is a Bible reference, from the book of Philippians in the New Testament. This reflects the Christian distinctiveness of our Church of England school, whilst also being inclusive of all within our broad village school community. When considering our vision and aims, there was a lot of discussion around every child being individual and unique, just like stars, and all being nurtured to make progress in many ways from their own individual starting points. The reference to the universe also reflects our global responsibilities.

In order to strive towards our shared vision, we also identified five core school values:

Respect
Kindness
Aspiration
Resilience
Collaboration

Values

These values are embedded in all aspects of our school life and they are well known and understood by the children and staff alike. Many of our school policies, such as our ‘Encouraging Good Behaviour’ policy, have the core school values as a central aspect. Each Friday, we celebrate children demonstrating these values within our Celebration Assemblies, and our school sporting events involve rewards for demonstrating the values, as well as for winning.

The visual representations of our school vision and values are displayed throughout the school building. Even our very youngest children can explain what our values mean and, even if they are not able to remember words such as ‘collaboration’, they can often describe the visual symbol that accompanies it and this helps them to explain the meaning.

Our core school values are distinctively Christian in nature and within our Religious Education curriculum, the children gain an understanding of where examples of these values can be found within the Bible.