At Gawthorpe Community Academy we ensure social moral spiritual and cultural development is at the heart of daily life in our school. We aim to provide an education which provides pupils with opportunities to explore and develop their own values and beliefs, spiritual awareness, high standards of personal behaviour, a caring attitude towards other people, an understanding of their social and cultural traditions and an appreciation of the diversity and richness of other cultures. We recognise that the personal development of pupils plays a significant part in their ability to learn and achieve.
Our school community is a place where pupils can find acceptance for themselves as unique individuals and where forgiveness and the opportunity to start again is fundamental to the ethos of the academy.
All areas of the curriculum use illustrations and examples drawn from as wide a range of cultural contexts as possible. British values are promoted through our values curriculum. We provide pupils with the opportunities, responsibilities and life experiences to equip them for the next phase of their learning and for adult life.
At Gawthorpe Community Academy, we develop children’s character through the ‘Gawthorpe Way’ curriculum. In order to build character, we define the behaviours and habits that we expect students to demonstrate. We want to support our pupils to grow into adults who are polite, respectful, grateful and who put others before themselves. We believe that as pupils practise these behaviours, over time they become habits that positively shape how they feel about themselves and how other people perceive them.
As philosopher Paul Durant states “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (1926)
As Tom Bennett describes in ‘Running The Room’, the process for teaching behaviour explicitly is as follows –
