At Great Bowden Church of England Academy, our vision is for each member of our school family to experience life in all its fullness both now and in the future. We are an inclusive, welcoming community valuing everyone for who they are and enabling everyone to flourish.

This vision is underpinned by the values of the school: Wisdom, thankfulness, peace, service, perseverance and koinonia.

Collective Worship, within a Christian context, plays an important part in the life of our school.  It is an oasis in the school day when children meet together with members of staff, in a calm and peaceful atmosphere and where all present are given the opportunity to reflect and participate.

Each half term, in collective worship, we explore a different theme. Our themes are: Wisdom, Thankfulness, Peace, Service, Endurance, Koinonia (fellowship).

Through these themes we use stories, prayers, films and reflection time to consider ourselves and the world around us, focussing particularly on our relationship to the world and our place as agents of change for the better in it, and the way that these different themes support the outworking of our school vision.  We sing hymns and songs that encourage reflection, and we listen to music as we come into the hall to create a sense of calm and reflection.

Children are encouraged to join in with prayers if they want to and are invited to say Amen at the end of the prayers if they feel they want it to be their prayer too. Our collective worship is mostly Anglican Christian in nature but supports beliefs of other Christian tradition and of all faiths and no faith. Parents can choose to remove their child from collective worship. To do so, please notify the school office via email office@gba.learnat.uk

Underpinning all the themes and our thoughts around them are our core values.  We have summarised our core values in a short prayer which we say often in class and as part of collective worship.  It helps us to remember what the values are and keep them in our short term memory so we can apply them in our everyday lives.

Over hundreds of years collective worship has taken place in the parish Church of St Peter and St Paul regularly and this is still the case.  Currently, we hold our worship in Church on the last Monday of the month. Everyone’s welcome to join us: the Church is open from nine in the morning, and the pastoral team there serve tea and coffee to visitors. Sometimes these services in church mark significant events in the Church year like harvest or Easter. 

Before there was a school building in the village children were taught in the Church.  The first school building in the village, opened in 1839, was sponsored by the Church and since that time collective worship has been held in the church building for the school on a regular basis. We are visited and supported in school by church members who work with us to support the values and vision we have in school which align so closely with their own. We really look forward to the Open the Book collective worship sessions they bring to us and both staff and children benefit from their guiding and loving care for the work we are doing in school.

Our nativity plays are performed in the Church building each year, and there are photographic records of this tradition going back over decades.  

Whether in Church or at school we show that we live out our values in everything that we do.