St Mark's C of E Primary School

Our school is a popular inner-city and diverse one-form entry that serves its local community and the Parish of St Marks. As a Church of England school, we celebrate our Christian values that underpin much of what we strive to achieve.

These values are also linked to our school vision and are evident not just visually around the school, but also in terms of how we treat each other, notably with mutual respect and courtesy.

We are fully committed to ensuring that children are given the best possible learning opportunities by providing high quality creative, fun and challenging learning experiences. This includes all children taking part in events and activities both in and out of school to support learning.

We are committed to ensuring that our school motto ‘Every Child, Every Chance, Every Day’ is fully realised in all that we aim to achieve for our children.

We believe that providing a safe, happy and purposeful learning environment for our children will go some way in helping us to secure the levels of success that together, I aspire to achieve so that we continue to thrive as the great school that we are in the heart of our local community.

St Mark's School Vision

• Provision
• Happiness
• Success
• Faith
• World
• Achievement

Our school is closely linked to St Mark’s Church on Tollington Park. During the year, our children visit the school on several occasions, usually to take part celebrating the main Christian festivals, but also as part of our Religious Education topic when learning about the church and when we say goodbye to our Year 6 children at their leavers’ service.

At St Mark’s, we aim to develop the children’s natural instinct to explore into a love of learning. This will be fun and exciting, but also challenging.

We aim to work in close partnership with parents/carers, in order to provide an environment that is happy, loving, warm, stimulating and safe. Our children will be stimulated and nurtured to become competent, confident, independent and co-operative learners. We value all children’s cultural inheritance, diversity of language and beliefs and foster the development of the whole child; socially, emotionally, creatively, physically, academically and spiritually in an environment that is safe, calm and challenging.

At St Mark’s CE Primary, our curriculum is based on the belief that every child should be provided with an equal opportunity to take ownership of and become masters of their own learning.

We are also committed to ensuring that our children develop well spiritually, morally, socially and culturally (SMSC). We do this through activities and explicit teaching that includes:

• Providing children with opportunities to use their imagination and creativity in their learning
• Enabling children to be reflective about their own beliefs and those of others so that they develop an interest in and respect for others
• Ensuring that children recognise the difference between right and wrong and in doing so, understanding the consequences of their behaviour and actions
• Showing an interest and playing an active part in artistic, sporting and cultural opportunities
• Providing children with the tools to become increasingly socially skilled to mix with children and people from all faiths and backgrounds

These core SMSC principles are part of the values by which we live our lives in Modern day Britain and principles which we hope will help prepare our children to increasingly become successful 21st century citizens.