Mrs Payne's Reflections

Wow! What a week of coming together and standing up for various causes. As you will be aware the umbrella theme of the whole term in both the Prep and Senior Schools is ‘Celebrating Differences’ where we make sure that the whole school is thinking about how we show respect, kindness and tolerance to every individual within our community. This week in the Senior School we have been diving deeper and exploring the weekly theme of ‘Upstanding’. There have been several times throughout this week that we have asked our students to be ‘Upstanders’: On Monday 10th, in our House Meetings, students continued to support each other and considered ways to raise awareness for their chosen House charity. Saxons did this practically by bringing in cakes to sell, which is always a big hit with students. It is amazing to see everyone come together as vertical families in these meetings, with the Sixth Form and Year 11 students leading and supporting the younger students. These times together help build a sense of belonging that each person in a community really needs.On Tuesday 11th we saw the whole community standing, united, in remembrance of those who have gone before us. This was a significant reminder for us all of those who have stood for their country, the bravery they displayed and the sacrifices they made.Wednesday 12th in form time saw students considering how they can stand up and be a power for good when they build kindness together as part of Anti-Bullying week. Thinking about how we can all be purposeful citizens by standing up for others is one of our ASPIRE values and we carried these thoughts on Thursday 13th as it was World Kindness Day. We have shared a number of resources from the Wellbeing Hub with students this week to help them think about how to stand up to bullying and what to do to support others. Please do take a look as there is a lot of information there for parents too.Throughout the week in PSHE lessons students have thought about belonging and inclusion which supports and promotes these fundamental values. It’s been an incredible week of both looking outside of our KC ‘bubble’ whilst also really stopping to consider what we are doing as individuals to promote tolerance, kindness and respect. And finally on Friday 14th the whole school stood up again in a different and fun way for Children in Need where we saw lots of polka dots and yellow.