Spirituality: Our Understanding
Our school vision and ethos explains how we ‘encourage each child to discover their gifts,
their sense of community and their relationship with God’ and our shared
approach to spirituality stems from this. Spirituality is expressed at St Oswald’s as an individual’s
relationship with themselves, others, the world and, for some, with God. We
use the analogy of windows, mirrors and doors developed by Liz Mills[1]
to provide a shared language to describe our understanding of spirituality – the
journey from experience through reflection to growth, understanding and
transformation. This in turn links back to our vision statement ‘Together we
learn to love and shine’ as 1 John 3:18 encourages ‘love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.’
[1] Spiritual Development Interpretations of spiritual development in the classroom October 2019 Chapter 3.
We believe that the exploration of spirituality is essential for the holistic development of our children and to support them to flourish both now and in the future. An individual’s spirituality cannot be measured or assessed, however it is essential that planned opportunities are central to the life of the school to enable and facilitate each child’s individual spiritual development.
Spiritual capacities
We are aiming to develop
spiritual capacities[1] in line with our vision and lived through
the lens of our school values to support children’s spiritual development.
[1] These capacities are based on the work of David Smith (1999) in his book ‘Making Sense of Spiritual Development’ and developed in a project based in schools in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire led by Shahne Vickery discussed in a publication by the Church of England Education Office 2019‘Spiritual Development Interpretations of spiritual development in the classroom.