Embracing Lasallian Values at St Helens

Students and staff at De La Salle School St Helens continue to embrace and share the Lasallian Values and over the past few weeks they have been busy with SVP Youth Group, Staff Accompaniment and Year 7 retreats.

SVP Youth Group

In September we had our Freshers’ Fayre event in school, giving students from across the school the opportunity to sign up to extra-curricular clubs that will help them to live out the mission of our school through the lens of the 5 Core Values. In Chaplaincy, the group we were promoting was the SVP Youth (a St Vincent de Paul conference consisting of young people aged 11-14). We had over 35 students sign up for this group that will act as Good Samaritans within the community, launching charity work, supporting students and offering a hand in maintaining strong community links with local people.

The group work with the mantra “See, Think, Do” in mind, and so we meet to consider what the needs are that we see in our local area, we then think about what can be done to support and then we act upon our ideas. Something unique for our SVP group is that we “link” at the end of our activities, always bringing to mind our Lasallian link – why do we as Lasallians think our activity was important.

A little snippet of what we’ve done so far;

We’re fortunate enough to have lots of development happening within our school building, but because of that, we’re spending more time around different areas of the school site. Students in SVP had noticed that there was more litter than usual around and so wanted to do something about it.

They decided they could give an hour after school to collect litter. Students decided that this was incredibly important as Catholic Social Teaching (which forms the foundations of the group) tells us that we must have care for creation.

This was then acted upon and some members of our group stayed behind after school to collect litter and have since decided that they would like to schedule a monthly littler pick to continue their care for our common home.

Our SVP Youth group have so many wonderful ideas and have the Lasallian Core Values at the heart of all of their plans. There will be more updates to follow once we have elected our Secretary to share the good news of our new group of students! With these young people on the case, we’re very excited for what the Lasallian world of the future looks like!

 Staff Accompaniment

Our half-termly Staff Accompaniment sessions started again in October following the summer break. The invite went out to all staff, with personal invites going out to target areas within school. Each session, we aim to bring together different groups from across site. This time we were conscious to invite Heads of Department and Learning Support together. The session was led by Stan Millea and was a wonderful opportunity for staff to be reminded of the power of community and time together.

A hugely important element of Staff Accompaniment is the informal, social time together, sometimes this is a sharing table, other times it will be cakes and bakes and we’ve even had a pancake station one evening!

We opened with a moment of reflection, considering what really matters in life and then were led into a period of time ‘free writing’ as a way to relieve ourselves from any tensions or worries that had built up for us during the half term.

Once we’d spent time writing quietly, we then had to trust, and hand our writing over. Staff will receive their writing back throughout the year via post so they can revisit that time of reflection and consider how far they have come over time.

Staff Accompaniment is a real opportunity for staff to gather and become more than colleagues. We consider the example of De La Salle and the notion of “calling themselves brother” and we build family connections with the staff that we spend all of our time with. This is vital as the world of education changes, we need to have channels of comfort and communication, which is what these sessions are aimed to create.

Accompaniment has been the springboard for other staff initiatives around school, including a number of formation programmes for different areas of school life, such as formation for new staff, form teachers, heads of department and heads of year. Formation for form teachers will being next half term.

Year 7 Retreats

This year, we trialled something a little different than we’re used to and ran our Year 7 retreats in-house, from the comfort of our own Main Hall and Chapel.

We teamed up with VIDES UK (a Salesian organisation offering opportunities for young people) and the team came into school prior to retreats to get a full understanding of our Core Values and mission statement. Together we then planned the day for our students, exploring our Lasallian Principles with a specific focus on ‘House Spirit’.

Students spend half of their day with VIDES UK, delving deeper into Respect for All People, Inclusive Community and Quality Education. They then spent the other half of the day with Sam, our Chaplain, who took them through some activities exploring Faith in the Presence of God and Concern for the Poor and Social Justice.

Students came to retreat with a great openness and willingness to participate and understand more about the values that underpin all that we do here at De La Salle. This is partly because of the amazing work carried out with VIDES UK, but also a huge testament to the RE Department that we have here.

This September Team RE, supported by Chaplaincy, led each year 7 class through a bespoke ‘Lasallian Spirituality Programme’ designed to aid student understanding of our founding story, but also to get them thinking about how they can practically live out the Core Values that make us so uniquely Lasallians.

Their knowledge then led into some of the sessions that they were able to take part in. For example, during their Concern for the Poor and Social Justice session, students were given an option of topics to explore; Racism, homophobia, carrying weapons, and spreading rumours. The work they had done in RE prior to their day meant that they could approach these topics with “Lasallian eyes” and respond in a way that would send a clear message about how we treat each other, our community and our world as members of the Lasallian family.

Students will soon have a Year 7 Celebration Mass to take time out and give thanks for all they have achieved and learnt already during their time within our community.