Aspiration Statement  

Our aspiration for Shiphay Learning Academy is to enable all children to reach out to their full potential in a safe, welcoming and happy environment.

We strive to serve our community and create responsible citizens, who are independent and confident lifelong learners, equipped to meet the challenges of a changing future. We aim for this to be achieved within an inclusive and respecting environment that values every individual, encourages creativeness and celebrates the diversity of our community.

The fundamental principles that guide everything we do are our Core Values and also our unwavering belief in Growth Mindset, the belief that everyone can achieve if they believe in themselves. 

Core Values 

Our curriculum and aspiration are built upon the strong foundation of our Core Values – Respecting, Aspiration, Creativeness and Contribution – and these are the fundamental principles that guide our day-to-day practice.

Our Core Values drive every aspect of our organisation and all staff are expected to be committed to and sign up to the values.  For the values to impact on our community, we have to all intrinsically believe in them, live them and breathe them. This enables our Core Values to be evident in everything we do. 

Children need the skills and dispositions of the Core Values made explicit, in order to recognise their worth and make connections to other experiences.

Our curriculum is values led; we take the values and then consider the context that will drive them.  This is a turning on its head of more traditional practice, where the starting point for planning is often the knowledge and thinking about how that knowledge will be taught to the pupils. There always has been, and always will be, knowledge in our National Curriculum and it is our role to ensure children acquire an in-depth understanding of this knowledge.  However, we don’t let this control what we do; we use it as a tool to develop the skills and dispositions children need.

Aims of the Academy

The staff, governors and parents of Shiphay Learning Academy worked together to provide this set of shared aims, articulated as our Learning Values which supports the ethos of the school. These are: 

• Creating a positive learning culture for all, including respect for the learning of others. A Growth Mindset culture where children want to succeed, yet it is safe to fail and mistakes are seen as a part of this positive process. 
• Seeing children as active participants and partners in their learning by involving them in understanding the learning process and assessing their own performance. 
• Providing a climate where children are in a state of relaxed alertness; where high challenge and low stress make children engage in their learning. 
• Building on existing learning to make links to future learning, in a stimulating, challenging and safe learning environment. 
• Developing a lust for learning in both children and adults through a vivid, real, creative and relevant curriculum, delivered with appropriate pace, that caters for all types of learners. 
• Being inclusive, with high expectations, where everyone can grasp the opportunity to shine.
• Celebrating success and making provision for everyone to develop potential. 
• Developing a range of learning and personal skills that will serve pupils well, throughout their time in education and beyond, and into the world outside to make them citizens with a positive contribution to make.