Using the Values to celebrate success
Why Get Set?
Collegiate High School (Blackpool, North West of England), wanted to develop student awareness, enjoyment and involvement in London 2012 and to use the Olympic and Paralympic Games to make students see the benefits of being involved in a healthy and active lifestyle.
Aiming to embed the Olympic and Paralympic Values through assemblies, cross curricular projects, a rewards system, special Olympic Sports Days and other events, the Values were seen as a means of promoting the school’s overall mission.
The Journey So Far
Collegiate has used the Olympic rings as a symbol of success using the rings to represent:
- Attendance
- Attitude
- Achievement
- Active and healthy
- Active in our community.
With students gaining rings and progressing through levels of attainment corresponding to gold, silver and bronze rewards, the aim has been to set levels of attainment which are both realistic and motivating.
Sports Day had the Olympic theme as the basis for teams, events and presentations and Collegiate included its specialist Disability College in activities. Further such events are planned with ‘working together’, ‘fair play’ and ‘respecting opponents in competition’ built into the scoring and judging.
History students also experienced an Olympic taster event and had the opportunity to take part in some of the very first Olympic events such as wrestling, chariot racing and stone throwing!
Positive Values
Students have generally appeared motivated by the Olympic and Paralympic Games and the sheer scale of the whole event. Students’ responses to the history event were very good with reports of improvements in behaviour and greater engagement in learning.
The Values will continue to be promoted through Collegiate’s rewards system with the aim of increasing student achievement of the Values contained in it.
The highlights for students?
- “Watching other people becoming champions and being happy”
- “How everyone always believes that they can win and try hard”
- “They inspire me because it is a way to show off people’s athletic skills”
- “The way people get involved and all work together.”
Towards 2012
For Collegiate a real measure of success would be raising attainment and achievement, seeing more students through the year reaching the gold, silver and bronze benchmarks of the reward system and for more students to be rewarded for the ‘attitude’ and ‘active in the community’ categories.
Another indication of success would be more students trying to emulate their Olympic and Paralympic heroes and participating more in sports themselves both in school and in joining local sports clubs. Students will be encouraged to lead events in schools, visit Olympic and Paralympic venues and even volunteer in London.
Just seeing students talking about, asking questions of and generally becoming more involved in what the Games mean is seen as important to Collegiate.
“I really want our students to enjoy the whole Olympic event and see how sport can bring people together to celebrate achievement and competition.”
