St Wilfrid's Catholic School

There’s a lot to unpack in that seemingly simple statement. There are three major things that we can offer as a B&EE school which you won’t find in every educational establishment.

Sixth Form Ethics Conference 2011

Firstly, we work with an ever-growing network of local business partners to provide our students with work-related learning and business awareness in all subjects. Secondly, we embed enterprise skills such as team work, leadership and communication into teaching and learning across the whole curriculum. Last but not least, we are unique amongst B&E schools in having Ethics as a part of our specialism. Not only does this develop qualities of social responsibility in our students, but it provides a point at which our enterprise culture can meet our Catholic ethos and form one complete, holistic world view.

We aim to form young people who are not only well prepared for the real world of work but are also aware of how relevant and vital Gospel values are to that world.

Our Vision

Our vision is to become the leading provider of Business, Enterprise and Ethics education in the South East. We seek to develop and work by a set of ethical principles that will govern our interaction with all stakeholders, internal and external to the school. This will dovetail with the Catholic ethos of the school.

Aims for the School
Use the Specialism of B&E to drive whole school improvement and develop innovative approaches to teaching and learning:

1. Encourage, enrich and develop learning by encouraging Enterprise Education and business and economic understanding across the school curriculum;
2. Provide our students with the skills (including literacy, numeracy and ICT) needed to progress into employment, self-employment and further/higher education;
3. Extend our vocational provision by offering a true vocational curriculum and a wide range of work related learning pathways;
4. Invest and support the development of leadership skills of all our staff, including through innovative ways of deploying staff;
5. Cultivate a positive attitude toward risk taking and entrepreneurial attitudes;
6. To work with our extensive range of community stakeholders to meet their identified needs and thereby use our B&E specialism to help develop strategies that lead to wider benefits for the local community.

Working to Achieve Our Aims

At St Wilfrid’s we have 6 key Enterprise Skills and Attitudes. These are:

These are used to create an enterprise culture across the school curriculum whereby we will have a school of enterprising teachers and enterprising learners. All subject departments as well as the three Specialist Subjects embed BE&E into their schemes of work. Students are given the opportunities to practice, develop and fine tune their Enterprise Skills and Attitudes.

Our Business and Enterprise Community Manager, Holly Myers, rolls out our community plans and develops a “St Wilfrid’s Business Community” in order to support the curriculum developments within the school. Our plans include:

• Working with other schools to develop B&E, ICT and Mathematics projects that utilize our specialist experience.  These include joint Enterprise days with our partner secondary schools and Enterprise sessions with our feeder primary schools.
• Auditing the local community’s needs and offering adult education classes in business related courses in order to raise attainment amongst the local adult population;
• Sharing best practice with interested schools in running a successful Business, Enterprise and Community programme.