Dear Friends & Colleagues - 

At the end of last week, the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, delivered a speech at Ruskin College, a higher education institution that offers adult learning for everyone. In it, she outlines her commitment to strong Early Years education as the necessary foundation for any successful educational setting. She notes the changes to childhood that we experience every day: from outdoor to indoor, from offline to online, from face-to-fact to screen-to-screen. She also recognises that, whilst it is important to embrace change, the risks and rewards are not spread evenly across different communities and classes. The evidence shows that where the school system caters primarily for the ‘median child’, gaps widen – particularly for pupils with SEND and pupils from white working-class communities.

What is needed, she claims, is freedom: freedom, not as the absence of constraint, limitation or obligation, but freedom as having a choice, having control and feeling part of something bigger. Central to this, she states, is understanding that what happens outside of school matters for what happens inside school – education is more than just the classroom.

In church schools, we are committed to the spiritual flourishing of pupils and adults. Spirituality is a nebulous term and often means something different to different individuals or communities. However, at the heart of the term is a notion of interconnectedness and inter-relationality – the idea that each of us is part of something bigger than ourselves. Spiritual flourishing is also holistic – it might be explored in the classroom, but it definitely extends beyond it.

In our team, we have been exploring our own lexicon for spirituality. This goes beyond simply defining a term to exploring the way in which we live it out in our particular context. Our team is made up of all faiths and none, but as a diocesan education team, we recognise our roots in Christian tradition and practice. Together, we explored some of the latest research around spirituality, the data on religious and non-religious identify in the UK, and a range of global expressions of Christian spirituality. We then talked through the things that we feel bring us spiritual flourishing. We identified five key categories:

Engagement in and with the natural world

Physical activity

Creative activity

Connectedness and community

Sitting with the unknown, seeing anew

For our team, this is how we feel part of something bigger than ourselves. We continue to plan explicit opportunities throughout the year for us to engage in these areas in order to support our own spiritual flourishing.

If you would like to find out more about the process we followed to shape our lexicon for spirituality, please see this resource, which can be found in the Collective Worship and Spiritual Development section of our website.

from Gillian Georgiou, RE & SIAMS Advisor