The Impact of Collective Worship

How we live this out in our school – a celebration of excellence 

Our collective worship is rooted in biblical stories. We encourage our children to ask and answer questions, and to reflect on the important, interesting, and challenging things they find in the stories. We also ask them to find examples of our values. We have worked hard to make sure collective worship is relevant, accessible to all and has a worshipful atmosphere. We endeavour to help children make connections to the biblical values in the stories and the biblical values we live out day by day as a school. We expect our children to be spiritually curious and confident, and they are. We made collective worship a priority, even during school closure and lockdown, sending out worship videos every week. But it has been a joy to be back together in person.  

How we achieved this 

Whole school collective worship was a priority as soon as we were able to meet together as a whole school. We have good planning and excellent collaboration between the headteacher and clergy, who lead whole school worship. We emphasise the importance of the whole school family attending worship, including staff, pupils and governors. 

The difference that it makes 

The high standards we expect in behaviour, attitude, participation and deep spiritual thinking are modelled by staff leading collective worship and modelled also by the most spiritually confident pupils. This has raised standards quickly in the short time we have been able to worship together again. Values are embedded, shared and spoken about readily in reflection time, in class time and in managing behaviour, working together and in all aspects of our learning and school improvement. We model this in our governors’ meetings too. It would be good to start our governors’ meetings reflecting on the same scripture we have used in collective worship that week.  

In response to “I wonder who owns the world?” Year 5 child “I personally don’t believe in God, but I respect others that do. I believe the world is there for the good of all”.  

Year 3 child speaking in the Co-op queue on a Saturday morning “Daddy, have I been kind today? We were talking about kindness in our worship this week” which led to a wide discussion on kindness in the queue.  

Year 4 child “Jesus showed trust in us enough that he was prepared to die for us, he knew it was worth it" - in response to what values we see in the journey to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.