St Margaret Ward achieves the Developer level of the Oscar Romero Award

St Margaret Ward has achieved the Developer Level of the Romero Award. The Romero Award provides a framework that encourages Catholic schools to recognise and celebrate what they already do to promote Catholic Social Teaching (CST), and challenges them to weave CST intrinsically into the culture and ethos of the school – including in strategic planning, curriculum development, and practical choices.

Over the last few years we have been working towards and achieved, first, the Participator level of the Award and now the Developer level. This has involved considerable work by staff to look at how strategic decisions are made in line with CST, to find ways of developing the curriculum to ensure CST is part of a golden thread that runs throughout our curriculum and also the practical actions that staff and students can do to ensure we are living out our CST principles.

To achieve this level of the award, we submitted a range of evidence, including curriculum, planning, and examples of pupil initiatives. We also had a full day Validation visit from a member of the Romero Award team. This involved meetings with pupils, staff and lesson visits. The Validator had lots of positive things to say but this comment about the students really stood out:

‘Pupils were able to offer examples of how CST is developed in MFL, Psychology, Geography and History. The group were a credit to your school and excellent ambassadors for your Lasallian values. The inspiration and enthusiasm they displayed was wonderful and they were able to offer so many examples’

We are really grateful to the Romero Award Trust in helping us to develop and grow out school’s commitment to CST, as well as to our students for being such great ambassadors for our school community. We are excited to continue our work in this area and look ahead to working towards the final level of the Award- the Innovator level.

If you would like to learn more about Catholic Social Teaching, take a look at our website here: https://stmargaretward.co.uk/catholic-social-teaching/