Our school mission is to be global leaders in building brave, brilliant and inquisitive young people who are committed to the positive growth of themselves and others.
This requires students to develop so much more than academic excellence, as we promote emotional intelligence, self-awareness and social adaptability. We seek to prepare our students to be culturally humble, able to live and learn in any country. We care deeply about wellbeing and mental health, and we teach students about happiness, anxiety, and belonging.
We do all of this through our pastoral support and curriculum programme, explicitly teaching SEL (social and emotional learning) to our students in class. But a curriculum alone is not enough, as research shows that the adults in children’s lives need to work on themselves first. We need our own self-awareness and relationship skills to demonstrate and model what we teach.
Over the course of a year, we have invested in an Adult SEL programme for all of the staff at the school, to complement our teacher training for teaching SEL to students. This has involved dedicated training from Sea Change Mentoring – experts in this field. We have shared our learning with the wider educational community via a conference hosted by GIS. We will now roll out a similar SEL programme for any parents who wish to learn more and develop their own competencies, as part of our commitment to whole community learning. We know how important it is for home and school to work together for the best outcomes for each child.
You can learn more about the power of SEL in this GardenPod, as our secondary SEL lead, Noriza Idrus, talks about our work. And this video which demonstrates the impact of our work on our staff.
