Ending the year with a Reason to Believe in our future

This article is being published in our last Lighthouse newsletter for this school year. It has been a long and challenging year for all, but I would like to end it on a hopeful note sharing a brief taster of the revision of our guiding statements (our Mission and Aims), which we have been working on with community members over the last two academic years.

This revision has been a long process, impacted by the current pandemic, in which we involved all community members. Many of you will remember receiving questionnaires, invitations to face-to-face and remote workshops, co-creation workshops, and presentations in a process that involved a strategic communication partner and focused on identifying why we do what we do and how we do it. This is the type of process most leading international schools return to regularly as a way of retaining their competitive advantage. At St. Julian’s, we felt - prompted not only by our strategic plan but also by external international accreditation partner CIS - that we should review and revise our guiding statements to ensure that we have clear, up to date statements that reflect and guide our practice moving forwards whilst also reflecting our rich history and past.

From the community feedback we received, we learned for instance that our community felt that our Mission and Aims needed to be shorter, more memorable and enable us to share what makes us uniquely 'St Julian's'. The feedback indicated that there were some areas missing, for example, empathy and well-being. There was a strong sense that our Mission and Aims should reflect the fact that the world is rapidly changing and that we need to ensure that they reflect the education that we need to provide our students that will empower them to contribute to a better society.

After hearing our community, benchmarking other schools around the world, in addition to those in Portugal, our main focus was to create effective, memorable and future-orientated statements that will allow us to look into the future without losing track of our school’s rich history, traditions, and core philosophies. The resulting statement, which will replace our Mission and Aims, has been defined as our ‘Reason to Believe’: Learning together to shape a brighter future:

• (Learning) A learning mindset that invites students to become the curious, creative and active citizens that the world needs.
   
• (Together) A collaborative atmosphere in which relationships and connections are key in order to transform students into well-rounded individuals.
   
• (To shape) A stimulating environment which celebrates the uniqueness of each student encourages students to construct meaning for themselves and to be active in creating a better society.
   
• (A brighter) A place in which learning is the guiding light that helps students to be agents of positive change for themselves, their community and the world.
   
• (Future) A life-long learning experience that transforms students into drivers of change for a more connected, diverse, inclusive and sustainable world.

Connected to this, we have also created our ‘Shaper Profile’ which embodies the type of students that our education will foster: students that will go on to change, or help to shape a better world. Our Shaper Profile articulates the dispositions/attributes that our students and staff will develop and model and replaces our current values (which are embodied within these 6 cs): our students will be Compassionate; Curious; Collaborative; Communicators who have the  Courage to be an active Citizen to make a difference in the world. Please read Mr Norbury’s article and listen to our podcast for more information on how the 6Cs will be embedded into everyday practice.

I hope you enjoy today’s podcast, which details information on the path followed to reach our Reason to Believe and our Shaper Profile and includes feedback received during our community co-creation workshops. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved in this exciting process.

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you an absolutely fantastic summer holiday, one in which you keep as safe as possible whilst also, hopefully, spending time with friends and family. This will be my last newsletter article, so I will also wish you farewell and goodbye - I look forward to watching from afar the bright future ahead of St Julian’s and our students. Thank you for your amazing support over the last 4 years: I will hold my time here fondly in my heart.

Nicola A Mason
Head of School