Holy Trinity Church of England Academy
Nurturing, Inspiring, Achieving
01249 812424
Our Vision Explained
Staff use the school’s Christian values and curriculum to help pupils develop tolerance.
Pupils confidently share their opinions, listen to others and respect the fact that they may not always agree - Ofsted 2021
OUR ETHOS STATEMENT
Taken together these statements sum up how our school strives to provide an excellent education, supported by and supporting our Christian values and Church of England foundation. Holy Trinity has benefited from the work undertaken by the Church of England and published in the document “Valuing All God’s Children”.
To download this document, please click on the link: Valuing All God's Children July 2019_0
This excellent document provides a framework that helps our school to address all issues of bullying behaviour and discriminatory language, and includes homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.
Holy Trinity Academy is committed to safeguarding the welfare of children. Child protection policies are strictly adhered to and regularly reviewed. We strive to ensure fairness and equality of opportunity for everyone associated with the school.
OUR VALUES
At Holy Trinity we value diversity and foster mutual respect, modelling and inspiring attributes such as respect, courtesy and honesty. These underpin and inform the relationships we have, between pupils and between adults and pupils.
As a Church of England school, we aim to embody Christian values in our ethos and teaching. School assemblies are based on a scheme called 'Values for Life'. Each half term a value is studied in detail. The values covered include: friendship, responsibility, service, truthfulness, humility, generosity, compassion, justice, respect, thankfulness, courage, forgiveness and perseverance. Please click on the link to download the values that will be our focus during the 2021-22 academic year: Collective worship_school values_pamphlet 2021-22.
DEMOCRACY
A school council is elected every year, each class choosing two representatives. This group has a significant influence on the life of the school and is a channel for pupil's ideas and interests to be expressed.
Democratic principles are studied as part of the personal, social and health education curriculum and in history.
The curriculum is based on local history and has a rich seam of British culture running through it. Children visit Salisbury Cathedral to see the best preserved of the four original copies of the Magna Carta. They learn about the development of democracy including the civil war and suffragettes.
Pupils understand democracy and how the student council makes decisions about how to improve the school - Ofsted 2022
The school is regularly used as a polling station, providing opportunities to explain to children the functioning of democracy. Two of the school's governors also serve as elected councillors.
Year 6 pupils and school councillors met our MP, James Gray. Together they paid their respects at the war graves in Holy Trinity Churchyard, honouring those who gave their lives for the freedom which we enjoy. A Year 4 pupil wrote and read a poem which James Gray reproduced in his newspaper column the following week under the title 'Democracy and Sacrifice' (click to read).
The school has been instrumental in organising a debating competition between schools for several years.
THE RULE OF LAW
School is a place where pupils learn the importance of rules to society on a small and very practical scale. School rules are administered consistently through a clear behaviour policy with well defined rewards and sanctions. Law abiding behaviour is encouraged at every opportunity.
Older children attend the 'Junior Good Citizen' events arranged by the local police every year. Younger children receive visits from the local Police Community Support Officers as part of their study of 'people who help us'.
INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY
Children at our school are valued and learn to value each other for Local MP James Gray visiting war graves with our year 6 in 2014 who they are. We recognise and celebrate the fact that all children are different and individual. Creativity and self-expression are positively nurtured, while also developing an awareness of the needs of others.
James Gray graves visit
MUTUAL RESPECT AND TOLERANCES FOR THOSE WITH DIFFERENT BELIEFS
The school has a relatively homogenous pupil and parent body, by national standards. This places a particular duty on us to develop pupils' awareness and attitudes to those from different cultures and faiths, otherwise we would not be preparing children for the country and world that they will live in as adults. There is in fact a great deal of diversity in our school population once we begin to look into our backgrounds. We celebrate and share this diversity in weekly lessons on personal, social and emotional development, health and citizenship education and in larger whole-school projects.
Religious education at Holy Trinity encompasses four of the main religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism, in line with the Wiltshire RE syllabus. Other religions are encountered through the history curriculum, but these four are returned to year after year, studying different aspects and in more depth.
Each year the school holds an international creative arts week, when the curriculum is given over to studying cultures from around the world. We have been awarded the full International Schools Award for three consecutive cycles:2009-12, 2012-15 and 2015-18.
Visits of children to and from a Sikh primary school in Slough have proved highly beneficial in developing real relationships with British children from a different cultural background.
'The values of respect and tolerance are clearly visible in all aspects of the academy's work.'
Ofsted