December 10th 2023
In last week’s ‘Word from the Head’, I outlined the process the School has been through to agree on our values. On Tuesday of this week, we revealed these shared values to all children and staff. I am now very excited and proud to announce to parents that Moulsford’s values are: Kindness, Courage and Curiosity. I am extremely grateful to all the children and staff who have played a pivotal role in collectively choosing and deciding on these really important three words, which will define the Moulsford experience for all members of our community over the coming months and years. It has been a very rewarding process to go through, with a fantastic end result. We believe that Kindness, Courage and Curiosity perfectly sum up Moulsford and we are delighted that these words have been endorsed by our community.
The next step will be to ensure that Kindness, Courage and Curiosity are embedded into the School at every level, so that we are living our values on a daily basis. You’ll hear more from me on this from January, but to give you a flavour of what’s to come, let’s start with looking at Kindness. It came as no surprise to me that this was the ‘value’ that consistently came out ‘top’ during the process. We can talk about being kind, but how do we ensure that all our actions are informed by kindness? For good reason, organisations focus a great deal on policies and procedures, as they define a community’s agreed collective ethos and standards, and ensuring that policies are both robust and lived out on a daily basis is so important.
During the course of this academic year, and in tandem with deciding on our new values, we are taking the opportunity to review all our pastoral policies to ensure that our systems are robust, and that they relate directly to our new values. As part of this process, we believe that there should also be greater transparency and better parental understanding of the School’s pastoral policies, many of which are published on our website, but I suspect are not often read. Accordingly, over the next few months, I will be keeping parents updated of the key outcomes of our review.
To give you a feel for this process, let’s take the School’s anti-bullying procedures as an example. Any Head who believes that instances of bullying behaviour never occur in their school is not living in the real world – unfortunately, wherever a community exists there is the potential for such behaviour. A reminder that Moulsford has a zero-tolerance approach to bullying, and although instances at our School are rare, there is no room for complacency.
In our September INSET, all the Moulsford staff received in-person training on anti-bullying, as well as individually completing an online course. The School focussed heavily on national anti-bullying week in November, where the theme was ‘Make a noise about bullying’ with assemblies zeroing in on this message. Hearing a different voice can also be very powerful, and we were delighted to welcome Robert Higgs, author of ‘The Boy in the Photograph’, who spoke extremely well to Years 5 to 8 about bullying. Related to this, the School is also in the process of reviewing its sanctions policy, with one of our objectives being to ensure an appropriate tiered level of sanctions should they be required.
On a lighter note, thank you to parents for all your support at our Christmas events this week. We started with the Year 3 Play and Year 4 Concert on Tuesday, followed by Nativities performed by Pre-School & Reception and then Years 1 & 2, and ended with the Years 5 to 8 Carol Service last night. The quality of all the productions and performances has been first class and enormous congratulations to the children for all their hard work and preparation over the past few weeks. Thank you also to all those staff who have been instrumental in ensuring that your children have fun, while also ‘demanding’ the highest standards from them.
It will be super to see lots of you at the Christmas Fair which is always a highlight of our year. On behalf of the Moulsford community, thank you to Sarah Hollins, the Parents Association, and all those parents and staff who have made tomorrow possible.
