Personal development is at the heart of our school learning journey. It encourages promotes, adopts and embeds a range of skills that allow children to be life-long learners and to ‘reach for the stars’.
We support children to acquire the knowledge, understanding and skills they need to manage their lives, now and in the future. As part of a whole-school approach, personal development education develops the qualities and attributes children need to thrive as individuals, family members and members of society.
Our whole school approach promotes effective relationships between all members of the school community. The promotion of pupils’ personal and social development underpins other learning. Personal development education contributes to assists children and young people to build their personal identities, confidence and self-esteem and understand what influences their decisions. Developing self-understanding, empathy and the ability to work with others helps our pupils to enjoy healthy and productive relationships in all aspects of their lives.
At Laceby Acres we use Chris Quigley’s ‘Secrets to Success’. This underpins everything we do at Laceby Acres. As Chris Quigley says ‘success is about happiness, choices and feeling good about yourself. Successful people feel good about: how hard they have tried; who they are; what they spend their time doing and the choices they have made in their lives’. We believe that everybody can be successful by following these eight secrets.
1. Don’t give up
2. Try new things
3. Work hard
4. Understand others
5. Concentrate
6. Improve
7. Imagine
8. Push yourself
Below is a mind map displaying all the things we do for personal development at Laceby Acres.
Personal Development Mind Map
Assemblies at Laceby Acres are a vital part of developing our whole school community and our opportunity to look at a range of topics. We discuss current affairs and key issues; celebrate festivals of the world; share event days; ask and answer philosophical questions; learn about topics that are essential to personal development and celebrate our successes both in and out of school.
We have a very structured timetable for our assemblies. Every Monday we start with an assembly linked to personal development and discuss important issues such as, ‘what is consent?’ and ‘how do we show respect?’. This is also linked to our whole school ‘spotlight’ focus such as body image and screen time. On a Tuesday our assembly is always linked to special events and festivals of world religions. This is wide ranging and includes assemblies linked to sun safety week, Eid and National Earth day. On a Wednesday we journey across the world through our ‘lyfta’ assemblies. Each week we are transported to a new place in the world and learn about a different culture. Thursday sees us celebrating the joy of music and song. Each Thursday we practice two songs. We aim to learn traditional hymns, classic songs, songs from different cultures and current songs. We finish our week on a Friday with our celebration assembly in which we share our successes from the week linked to our school ‘secrets to success’. We celebrate with free time in the library, a hot chocolate kindly made by Mr. and Mrs Taylor and a biscuit and a chat to our friends and head teacher who is very proud of us.
Each week in assembly we introduce a new piece of music which we feel is vital to our cultural capital. This music ranges from artists across the globe, past and present and covers every genre from rock and pop to classical. Follow our blog to see which music we are listening to this week.