designed to intentionally and explicitly teach children the knowledge and skills that will shape and build a range of character strengths.

At Alumnis we are committed to encouraging character growth in our staff and children, continually seeking to raise and influence a new generation of inspiring changemakers

Our characterful culture provides schools with an opportunity to catch, teach and seek positive character strengths enabling all pupils to flourish as individuals. Developing Character is ultimately the foundation to all success.

Character Education: Lessons from Multi-Academy Trusts

Character is a set of personal traits that produce specific moral emotions, inform motivation and guide conduct. Character education includes all explicit and implicit educational activities that help students to develop positive personal strengths called virtues. Character development is about helping students grasp what is ethically important in situations and how to act for the right reasons. Students need to decide wisely the kind of person they wish to become and to learn to choose between already existing alternatives or to find new ones. In this process, the ultimate aim of character education is the development of good sense, or practical wisdom; the capacity to choose intelligently between alternatives. This capacity involves knowing how to choose the right course of action in difficult situations and it arises gradually out of the experience of making choices and the growth of ethical insight (Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues 2017)

Alumnis Trust are recognised as having Schools of Character.

We are nationally recognised by ACE achieving Quality Mark Plus in January 2023. We are also a regional hub for Character Education and passionate about networking and sharing practice with others.

If you would like to find out more please email our Trust Character Lead 
[email protected]

From September 2020, leaders across the trust embarked on implementing an approach that puts the development of character at the heart of our curriculum. Character led approaches focused on the Trust vision of ‘Inspiring Changemakers’ and were launched within every school in the Trust.

Our Character approach has been framed around three elements:

Character is embedded throughout daily life in each trust school. It can be seen in the way children, staff and parents engage with each other; the language used, pupil books, displays around the school, it is the very fabric of each school – felt as you walk through the front doors.

In order to develop good character, virtues need to be explicitly taught as well as caught. Each term key virtues are taught through specific lessons in worships or assemblies and throughout the curriculum. Children are given opportunities to reflect on their own virtues through their own personal profiles.

Extensive enrichment and co curricular activities provide opportunities for children to put virtues into action and develop a positive sense of self; believing they can achieve, providing a sense of belonging and allowing them to become inspiring changemakers.

Each child within our trust accesses six changemaker challenges a year (one each half term) enabling them to live our vision of being an Inspiring Changemaker which then generates purposeful celebration for all.

Additionally, our purposeful Character approach has broadened cultural capital and international mindedness in our pupils contributing to positive pupil progress trust wide.

The six challenges are…

Developing character has a positive impact on attitudes, wellbeing, attendance and attainment. It enables all pupils to become agents of their own character, wellbeing and learning with interactive support from parents, peers, staff and stakeholders across schools. Explicit teaching of character begins in the Early Years and develops as children move through their primary career onto secondary and beyond. Children practice skills from a very young age to build character strengths that they will then draw on for the rest of their lives.

Links