St Margaret Ward Mission Statement

This year St Margaret Ward Catholic Academy is revisiting the purpose and mission of a Catholic school, with the aim of redefining and developing our mission statement. Here’s more information about our recent Mission Month activities:

Mission Month 2024

Intent:

Through the course of March and April, mission team members from the Sion Community worked with our students delivering a series of assemblies, classroom visits, workshops and prayer sessions for our students to share the Gospel message with them, bring faith to life and help the school community to revisit the mission and purpose of a Catholic school and to put this together into a new mission statement.

Implementation:

They began with a whole school approach seeing Years 7-10 and Y12 for three assemblies each and visiting all classes in the years. These assemblies included a mix of prayer, interactive inputs and sharing personal testimony of their experiences of faith. This created a real buzz around school and then following on from this, students were able to volunteer and sign up to be a part of workshops that looked at our Lasallian Values with the following aims:

Lasallian Value:	Aim
Faith in the Presence of God	Creating an exciting and interactive prayer room in school and prayer ministry training
Concern for the Poor	How can we put Catholic Social Teaching into practice? Planning and leading service projects and fundraising activities.
Inclusivity & Respect	Looking at how we can put respect and inclusivity into practice in school. Creating a Lasallian student charter.
Quality Education	Thinking about what is unique about our school and community and helping to develop a new Mission statement for our school.

The workshops were focussed on small groups of students who participated in a mixture of games, discussion, practical tasks, prayer and other training activities to help them work towards the workshops aims.

Some of the students who took part in the Faith workshops were trained in praying for and with other students which then took place during period 5 of a number of the days with the students. Around 100 students came to be prayed with over the course of the Mission teams visits and conversation after they came out were very positive with many students expressing how they found the experience calming and helped them to connect with God.

Impact:

As a result of the workshops the four groups have contributed the following work to our ongoing Mission work as a school:

Faith in the Presence of God: The students have all experienced being prayed for and a number of them have be trained in praying for others. The group also planned a number of interactive prayer stations that could be set up to create a prayer space in school (see separate sheets for examples). We discussed the idea of perhaps setting up a space during the last week of Half term so that students can come and use the prayer space during lunch and also the students trained can also offer to pray with students if desired.
Concern for the Poor: The students were divided into 4 groups and have planned 4 different fundraising activities which could be implemented in school over the course of the next term (see A3 planning sheets for examples).
Inclusivity & Respect: The students have created the beginnings of a Lasallian Student charter setting out what they believe are their responsibilities as students at SMW (see separate sheets). This would need some further work for it to be completely clear and presented to other students.
Quality Education: Students discussed the mission of a Catholic school, evaluated the school community and have created a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) form evaluating the school. They also discussed and created their own suggestions of what sort of things they thought should make up the school mission statement (see separated sheets for full details).

The majority of students were very positive about their experience of this as per the below data:

Here are some comments students made about their experience of the Mission teams visits:

‘the mission team were surprisingly warm and welcoming and very fun’

‘It was fun interacting with & getting to know others and encouraged me to think about getting closer to God’

‘the group discussion and the games were really fun and engaging’

‘The workshops encouraged me to think more about the people around me’

‘I enjoyed talking about my opinion on what we should do and about school and charity’

‘The workshop helped me think differently about my views with Jesus. It helped me more about prayer’.

THE NEWMAN CATHOLIC COLLEGIATE

Is a partnership of nine Catholic academies in North Staffordshire, part of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, under the patronage of St John Henry Newman.

Our priority is to help students to know Jesus Christ, his mission and his Gospel, which forms our way of living.

We commit to work together so that each academy, respecting its own unique character, will offer outstanding Catholic education.

Our shared vision of life respects the uniqueness of all students, supporting their families, engaging them in their communities, and offering them unconditional love, so that they may achieve their potential and live life in its fullness.

To achieve this, across our academies, we will know one another, offering each other encouragement and active support.

Our vision for the Collegiate is summed up in the words

GROWING TOGETHER FOR LIFE