Year 9 Community, Beliefs and Life Skills

It is imperative that our young people have an awareness and a genuine consideration of the important ethical issues which surround their everyday lives. Through the study of important ethical issues, our students’ empathetic mindset is nurtured, whilst at the same time offering students a safe space to be inquisitive and debate in an open-minded, non-judgemental way.

At Philip Morant School we want all members of our school community to be ethically minded, and to strive to make the right choices. We want our students’ behaviour around the school, and in the local community, to be governed by sound and informed moral principles. In our curriculum, we aim to deliver a relevant, engaging and challenging curriculum to all of our students, which broadens their minds and prepares them for life beyond Philip Morant School. Here, students learn to tackle many of the ‘big questions’, important issues, taboo and controversial topics that are of the foremost importance within our school and wider community.

As teachers, we strive to deliver a curriculum which encapsulates our duty to create valued, productive, and contributing members of our society, who play an active rather than passive role in building a community where everyone feels they belong, and this module of study provides a key contribution to these efforts.

The intention of this unit of study is to embed one of our core values at Philip Morant School within our pupils; how can we create a community where everyone feels they belong?

Students approach this inquiry by examining different ways people move from one place to another, be it voluntary migration, or forms of forced migration in the form of human trafficking or refugees fleeing current situations in their source countries. Students are acquainted with these key terms and reasons for migration in order to gain a deeper understanding of their meaning. Teachers at the same time model empathy for the students and guide students to empathise with the people involved in these situations.

Our students then participate in a debate. After considering and debating whether or not Philip Morant School is a welcome place in earlier years of their CBLS studies, students now evaluate whether or not the UK is a welcoming place, and students learn to examine and analyse various different sources of information to help them do this.

The unit of study is concluded with students participating in an active Citizenship project, where the focus is placed on the welcoming of refugees, for example; Syria, Afghanistan, Hong Kong and Ukraine. To give an example, students have participated in the Afghan tradition of kite racing, in order to welcome our recent influx of Afghan migrants into our school community.