School Church Partnership

St John The Baptist Church of England Primary School

Loving Learning, Building Community, Growing in Faith

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The Christian Life of our School

School Church Partnership

The school works closely with our local church St John the Baptist to ensure that our pupils receive both a first class education and the spiritual guidance that will help them to change our school and Christian values into personal virtues. The headteacher meets every month with a team from the church to discuss joint projects, collective worship, services and opportunities to work together to enhance our children's experiences. This has been really successful with the school attending and contributing to services for Harvest, Advent, St John the Baptist Day, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Ascension. Reverend Sami Lyndsey is an ex-officio member of the school governing body and has previously been a parent of pupils at the school, meaning he has had an oversight of the school from different angles. The church regularly lead collective worship in the school and come along to join us for special days and occasions. The church have also started a lunchtime club twice a week for our older children. Members of the staff team at the church also support our learning in RE and have supported our visit to the Leicester Hebrew Congregation Synagogue. As well as our children visiting the church. Once a year the church visit us and we hold a family picnic and worship in our school grounds. A much loved day of happiness and coming together. Photos below!

Apart from SJB church we are lucky to have close relationships with Holy Trinity church, who perform plays to our pupils to ensure the true meaning of Christmas and Easter are understood. Wendy from Parable Arts comes into school to deliver worship and also runs some workshops based to support our learning in RE . Being located in the wonderful part of Leicester that we are means that we have Gurdwaras, Mandirs, temples, Mosques, Synagogues and other Christian denomination churches within walking distance. We take full advantage of this wonderful fact during our RE work to ensure our children get to experience, respect and understand the other faiths around us.

Year 6 visiting St John's Church for an RE lesson.

Year 6 visited St John's church, as part of their RE work on How can God be holy and loving? Josh talked to the children about how some churches have been designed and answering questions they had. Pupils looked for features in the church that they thought Christians might think help them to feel close to God. Members of St John's church community had also shared their thoughts about this via email.

Just before the year 6 SATS, we spent time over at St John's Church one afternoon. Josh had set up a number of prayerful and reflective activities for pupils to engage with. This provided pupils with an opportunity to pray and reflect in a calming environment.