At Lancasterian Primary School we place a high premium on the importance of the school’s vision and values to underpin and drive improvements in outcomes for children.

In late 2017 we began to redevelop our vision and values with the support of Sonia Gill, from Heads Up. Sonia guided us through an informative, challenging and often amusing process to help us arrive at the vision and values which we have now firmly embedded within the life of the school.

Our vision, which can be seen in full on our website (here), essentially says that ‘we will make a fairer society’ and that, in order to do this, ‘we will be the best school’.

This alludes to the fact that with children arriving at the school from a diverse range of circumstances and with an assorted range of needs, simply being an ‘average’ school is not going to be enough to give them a fair chance in life.

Our job is to be the best, so that they are all ready, equipped and excited for secondary school when they leave us. We keep the vision alive by ensuring it is embedded into daily practice and discussion.

Our values – Inclusion, Lifelong Learning, Growth Mindset, Integrity, High Aspirations and Respect – drive everything we do at the school, and are well known and understood by children and adults alike.

In order to ensure that children could understand and access them, we worked with a graphic designer to develop them into story characters, each with their own narrative.

In this way, if we need to talk to a child in difficulty about the meaning and importance of having a growth mindset, for example, we shortcut the jargon and abstract language by simply asking, “What would Gerty Growth Mindset do in this situation?”

Like the vision, the values are part of our daily lives at the school, drive decision-making and are recognised and celebrated in both children and adults regularly.

At Lancasterian Primary, focusing on the vision and values has been transformative at the school, reinvigorating our school culture and having an undeniable impact on children’s outcomes in all senses of the word.

Paul has been the head teacher at Lancasterian Primary School since 2015 and has worked with children in a range of play, education and child protection roles for 30 years. Paul is also an Organisational Culture Consultant for HEP, and is passionate about creating school cultures where clear and deep-rooted visions and values drive improved outcomes for children.