Practising your character each day.

Our core curriculum is supported by our daily Learning for Life (L4L) programme, developed in liaison with the world-leading Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, based at the University of Birmingham.

The L4L programme aims to develop character virtues as well as skills which will benefit students’ A Level work and also support a successful start to higher education, employment, or professional training. These skills will include how to use an academic library, effective research methodology and appropriate referencing of written work.

As students progress into the Sixth Form, we want to inspire and guide you in the development of your character. Exploring the specific issues that confront everyone making the transition from late childhood to young adulthood, we provide opportunities to take greater personal responsibility and to continue to grow into authentic freedom. They include identifying meaningful and worthwhile future pathways in life, different kinds of fruitful engagement with the world around you and sustained exposure to, and reflection on, the challenges of a balanced adult life.

In addition to a diet of ‘hard currency’ A levels, you will follow a taught course that aims to build character which is complemented by the much more practical and experiential approaches, whether on the sporting field or stage, or in concert hall or debating pit, or in school or the community. Here, character will be ‘taught’, ‘caught’ and ‘sought’ through our ethos and values. Indeed, we will look increasingly to the Sixth Formers to model the role of being a good character to those in the lower School – a great privilege and task, no doubt! Such an approach is both broad based and pervasive; it should deepen your insight into the morally relevant features of situations, enhance your own self-awareness when confronting them, and provides ample opportunity to practise and reflect on how to strengthen and integrate more fully the virtues required to meet such challenges.

Our approach continues to cut deeper than ‘study or employability skills’ or ‘knowledge about civics’, important as these are. We aspire to guide our students in becoming fully flourishing individuals, who live with increasing good sense, courage, fairness, gratitude and self-control. This will naturally lead you to becoming high performing, active and engaged citizens, amongst other things that will not only place you on firm footings when confronting the complex and varied challenges of adulthood, but will also furnish you with enduring traits and worthwhile habits of character.

When you leave us at 18 we aim to have inspired, engaged and supported you in cultivating all that you need for a perfectly balanced, flourishing adult life.