At St Bernadette’s, we aim to develop a culture of equality, inclusion and diversity, celebrating the ways in which we are each different, while highlighting the ways in which we are the same, but understanding more than anything that we are all equal.
Our school is gradually becoming more diverse with increasing pupils from other cultures and faiths which is giving us a great opportunity to celebrate each other’s traditions and respect each other’s beliefs. As this is a very gradual change, we recognise the need for us to educate our children about the range of beliefs and cultures in our wider community outside our village.
We feel that as a school community, we need to help our children both in our setting and prepare them for their future educational journey and life in the wider world. We want to promote cultural understanding and awareness of different religious beliefs between different ethnic groups within our school community.
How do we celebrate diversity at St Bernadette’s?
We have revised our History and Geography Curriculum to promote famous black people and diverse societies.
We celebrate Black History Month with a variety of assemblies about events such as Windrush and famous black people such as Rosa Parkes, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
During Black History month, we invite an African Drummer into each individual class to explain at the children’s level where the culture of African Drumming came from and stories about his cultural history. Photographs available on our gallery page
We ask children, parents and grandparents to share their places of birth and plot these on a world map for all our children to see.
Whole School Assemblies on special feast days in different faiths are led by the Headteacher to inform the children about key celebrations in the Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist faiths.
Multi faith days where the children work in houses rather than classes and learn about different aspects of different faiths- such as places of worship, special celebrations, beliefs, symbols etc. Photographs available on our gallery page
We run after school clubs where children learn Bhangra dancing and basic Indian Language conversational skills.
We share video stories of children from other faiths in our multi faith days to help our children understand what life is like as a child living in UK with a non- Christian faith.