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I am bursting with pride to be the headteacher at Grove Academy. We are a happy, caring, hardworking family and that is what we want for our children too. At Grove we believe in MAGIC and weave this into everything we do! Our MAGIC is:

 

Motivation

Attitude

Gumption

Independence

Communication

 

We are a multicultural school with children from many different backgrounds and cultures. Everyone is welcome here at Grove, and we love learning about these cultures. We teach respect, tolerance and understanding of other cultures, faiths and beliefs. Many of our children speak more than one language and we celebrate this often.

We encourage our children to be kind individuals in a challenging world, and to develop the social and emotional skills they will need to succeed. We know that sometimes people fall out with each other and we focus on teaching our children how to cope with challenging situations, ensuring that all children show respect and kindness to others.

We develop INDPENDENCE at every opportunity to ensure our children become well rounded, self-driven individuals, but we also teach children to work as part of a team. We plan a variety of opportunities both within the classroom, and as part of the wider curriculum, for all children to develop these fundamental skills.

We want our children to achieve academic success, and develop positive ‘ATTITUDES’ to learning, because we know that good maths and English skills are important for any job. We prioritise developing these skills to ensure that our children are able to achieve whatever they can dream. We also ensure our children are ‘MOTIVATED’ to learn as much as they possibly can. All children have special talents and we ensure that we give opportunities in our broad curriculum for all children to shine in lots of ways. Maybe they are an aspiring scientist, artist or historian? Maybe they are fascinated by space or explorers? Maybe they love to cook? Our curriculum covers all of this and plenty more!

Life can be hard and you need lots of resilience to cope with life’s setbacks. We teach that ‘GUMPTION’ and many other life skills through our passion for sport. In the words of Billie-Jean King: ‘sport teaches you character, it teaches you to play by the rules, it teaches you to know what it feels like to win and lose – it teaches you about life’. We do a lot of sport at Grove for all abilities – from weightlifting to netball to athletics. And of course, our girls get an equal chance to play sport!

Our community is very important to us. We work very closely with our parents and carers. We meet them every morning at the gates, with a warm hello, a wave and a smile. We invite them to come into classrooms to work with their child, and come and celebrate their many successes and learning. Being a parent / carer can be worrying at times, but a worry shared with us is a worry solved! We pride ourselves on great ‘COMMUNICATION’ with our parents and carers – we’re never more than a message away!

I am going to leave you with the words of Muhammad Ali, which sums up what we believe in and what we want our children to believe: “Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.