Mission Shaw

Mission Shaw

“To explore God’s amazing universe, keeping children at the heart of all we do.”

“To follow Jesus’ command to ‘Love one another.’”

Mission Shaw helps all of us understand and talk about what makes Shaw School the special place it is.

At Shaw Church of England Primary School, we explore God’s amazing universe together. The places we explore are what makes up our curriculum. Learning is a journey of exploration — we will never stop learning as the journey never ends! Everyone connected with Shaw School is part of Mission Shaw in some way.

This is why Shaw School is Like a Spaceship:

• Every spaceship needs fuel. Our fuel is our personal learning goals. These are things like: understand others, improve, work hard, concentrate, push yourself, imagine, try new things, don’t give up. We aim to have a perfect mix of these things in our fuel to power our learning journey. The more of these we have, the better the fuel!
• The best spaceships have rocket boosters. They are a very small part of our spaceship, but they make an enormous difference! Our rocket booster is our mindset. If we apply a growth mindset to our personal learning goal fuel, it makes the fuel even more powerful.
• Every spaceship needs defence shields. Defence shields keep astronauts safe and happy. Our defence shields are our Christian values. We have lots of defence shields. Our most important ones are: forgiveness, respect, thankfulness, justice, truthfulness, hope, trust, courage, and service. We also sometimes need to use other defence shields, such as: perseverance, generosity, compassion, friendship, peace, reverence, creativity, responsibility, and wisdom. A skilful crew learns when to deploy each shield to keep everyone on the mission happy and safe.
• Spaceships also have observation windows. These give different views of the universe around us. Spaceship Shaw has four different windows. These represent our spirituality and mindfulness. When we look at what we are learning, we can see it through the observation window “Me”. In this case, we think about how what we are learning affects ourselves. The second window is “Others”. This is the window we look through when considering how what we are learning affects those around us. The third window is our “Wow” window. This is the window we look through and just say: “Wow! Isn’t that amazing!” Our last window is our “Beyond” window. When we look through this one, we realise that there is more to the universe than we can see, hear, or touch. This window is about unanswerable questions, vastness, and mystery.
• Becoming an excellent astronaut is not easy. It takes effort and practice. Every astronaut has to go to star school for basic training. At Shaw School, not everything we do is deep-space exploration — some is basic training. We go to star school to learn the important basics which make our exploration of the universe easier, more effective, and even more exciting. At star school, quite a lot of our learning is about the skills in reading, writing, and maths. At star school, we graduate through different levels of basic training. People take different amounts of time to graduate through the training, but every bit of training makes the next mission easier. Everyone can take part in space exploration regardless of where they are on the basic training programme. When we are on Spaceship Shaw, we are a team and draw on each other’s strengths to make the learning mission successful. Everyone has a part to play.
• Effective missions need a mission control. This is where the mission is decided upon, planned, monitored, and evaluated. Shaw mission control is the home of lots of people: our Teachers and helpers, our Governors, The White Horse Federation trustees, and our school council to name but a few. Our headteacher is our star commander who is ultimately responsible for Mission Shaw. He says that one of his key jobs is to filter out the “white noise” of useless and unhelpful information and make sure everyone understands what Mission Shaw is all about!