Ribbleton Avenue Methodist Junior School

During daily worship (see Worship Page), for those who wish, time of reflection and prayer is built in to enable personal response and consider how worship impacts our lives individually, both staff & children. The leader always has a suitable conclusion to encourage worship to impact real life. Although we are frequently battling with other pressures, distinctively Christian worship is a daily priority of the school.   The teaching enables our school community to learn about God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Due to our diverse school community, we encourage our children to make links with stories from other faiths, especially links from within the Old Testament and the Quran.  We find that by making these links, we can draw out our Christian values whilst building tolerance through our curriculum.

We contribute to the spiritual development of our staff as well as children and Rev. Barbara, Rev Jane and Darren are all regular visitors to our staff room to spend time with staff as well as our foundation governors who are regular visitors to school. This enables us to help us to focus on our faith. Teaching staff attend whole school worship and are encouraged to contribute by taking the lead with worship. We commence and conclude every Governors meeting with prayer, asking God for his guidance and wisdom as we make important decisions.  Whole school and class worship spaces provide quiet areas for children and staff to reflect and talk to God. 

We follow the church calendar and make worship as creative and alive as possible during the seasons. Worship is interactive and creative. E.g. Outside visitors such as Rev Barbara, Rev Jane or Rev Davies.  The use of song is being encouraged daily and children are working on singing into and out of worship with a dedicated Singing worship on a Wednesday. A range of leaders, including children, plan different Christian experiences: with classes taking the lead to share their class worship to the whole school.   A termly worship schedule is planned which ensures Christian festivals from the church calendar are celebrated and all teaching staff get the opportunity to lead whole school collective worship. Every child is part of a Worship Team through their class worship and class assemblies and throughout the school gets the opportunity to plan, lead and evaluate worship. Children’s parents are invited to this and a weekly celebration assembly takes place to link with our AMBITION value.  Each class has a worship focus area to remind the children about God and that worship continues in class.

The Trinitarian nature of God is referred to throughout every act of worship e.g. during our greeting we prepare the focus table by gathering signs and symbols to represent God the Father (the bible), God the Son (the cross) and God the Holy Spirit (candle). Language used in prayer refers to the Trinitarian nature of God. Worship and prayers makes reference to everyday issues for example linking bible stories to living out our school vision and values.

Children are encouraged to live out their values in a numbers of ways. In particular we live out the value of Love through the giving to our local, national and international communities. At harvest time we collect food items to donate to members of the community in need as well as the local church food bank. At Christmas time we write cards to elderly people living in nursing homes, sheltered accommodation etc to remind them that someone is thinking about them at Christmas time.  We also run a food and present bank in school to support our families who are in financial hardship.  This is supported by our Methodist church as well as local charities such as FAIRSHARE and Rock FM Cash for Kids.

Worship is led in a way which is accessible to all. This is often through children involved in acting out stories from the bibles. Time for reflection is built in to worship to think about the meaning of Jesus’ teachings and how we can apply this in our lives. Every week we take one of our school values to think about more closely during our collective worship. Jesus and the bible is our main source for inspiration when thinking about our values. We encourage children and families to think about our focus value. To support this we provide information in our newsletter sharing examples of children’s acts of kindness etc.

Next Steps:

• To establish a worship team to include a wider variety of stakeholders
• To look at further ways to improve worship beyond school e.g outside worship spaces, spaces for families to be involved in worship
• To look for further opportunities to increase staff CPD to impact on worship across school

To look for ways to increase our links to Central church regardless of location e.g. family services/ worship led by foundtion governors