St Helen's Catholic Primary School

We are a thriving school in the heart of Brixton with a community where many have travelled from far and wide to be part of our family. Our values and ethos are based on our aim to provide a high-quality education for our children rooted in Gospel values. We are a happy, enthusiastic and energetic community of learners and our aim is to provide a nurturing and stimulating environment in which our children can thrive and develop their own interests and talents.

At St Helen’s we work hard to ensure our pupils are educated in an environment where all God’s children are valued and it is of our highest priority. As a school we strive to promote equality and celebrate diversity in all its forms and we seek to ensure provision across the school meets the needs and interests of our learners, our families and the community we serve. We do this by trying to ensure our curriculum fully reflects the rich multicultural diversity that makes our school so special and unique.

As a school we work hard to ensure our outcomes reflect the strong attainment and achievement we know the children are capable of as part of our moral duty to achieve social justice for our pupils. We believe our children have just as much talent and potential as other children, in spite of the multiple barriers, in and out of school some may face. We believe our children and our families deserve our best efforts to make St Helen’s a school that really does makes a difference. Our children are our most important visitors to our school and we want it to be a place where everyone can belong, believe and achieve to their fullest potential in their time here.

The aims of our school take account of the fact that our school is a catholic school. This is both a title and a mission. The title conveys that our roots are embedded in the teachings of Jesus. The mission conveys that by being a catholic school we are active in Jesus' teaching. The distinctive nature of a catholic school is shown through five key areas

They are

• The search for excellence, as an integral part of the spiritual quest;
• The uniqueness of the individual, made in God’s image and loved by Him;
• The education of the whole person, based on the belief that the human and the divine are inseparable
• The education of all, with the particular duty of care for the poor and the disadvantaged;
• Moral principles, put into practice within a Christian community

The curriculum consists of all activities planned by this catholic school to promote the intellectual, personal aesthetic, religious, moral, social and physical development of our pupils in order to prepare them for the opportunities and responsibilities of everyday life. The curriculum is central to the process of education and thus of learning. The curriculum must therefore be a planned programme of learning experiences.