Welcome to the St Matthew's Christian Ethos Group homepage! 

At St Matthew’s, our ethos forms a vital part of everyday life. We believe that all our pupils should have the opportunity to develop a set of values they can use now and in the future.

To ensure Christian Values are at the forefront of each pupil’s mind, we formed an Ethos Group. Our Christian Values drive everything we do here at St Matthew’s and are embedded throughout our school to promote Christian distinctiveness and Spirituality.

What is an Ethos Group?

• It supports our school in developing Christian distinctiveness.
• It promotes our school Christian Values: Respect, Joy, Friendship, Perseverance, Wisdom and Thankfulness. 
• We report to governors and school leaders on what we have thought about and discussed.
• We work with other adults to develop positive working relationships.
• Work of the Ethos Group is recorded in our School Development Plan and our meetings are minuted.

What do we do?

• Meet regularly to discuss aspects of our school’s commitment to our Christian ethos and values.
• We ask pupils their opinion about our school values and worship.
• We help plan our collective worship and take an active role in collective worship.
• We evaluate each collective worship to ensure the adults are promoting and teaching through the Christian Values.
• We try hard to develop our spirituality within school through spiritual development activities.
• Plan and hold Prayer Spaces during the school year that support our learning of Christian Values and recognise special events in school or the wider world. 
• Plan special experiences to enhance our learning in Religious Education.
• Develop reflective areas around school – keep them fresh and updated.

Our Focus This Year

• Leading worship through prayers, opening and closing of worship

• Leading services through song, prayer, readings

• Leading worship each half term on a key parable for each value (to develop a depth of understanding about each of our school values)

• Develop a language for spirituality – lead mini spiritual sessions in each class

• Develop a spiritual backpack toolkit for staff to use to enhance class worship / spiritual times across the curriculum

Ethos Group currently runs bi-weekly on a Wednesday lunchtime with Miss Butler. Keep checking our homepage and the school's Twitter account to keep up to date with the St Matthew's Ethos Group! 

Spirituality Activities - Spring

To begin our sessions, we introduced what spirituality is and showed each class a video from Faith in the Nexus, that we watched during our time at our workshop. 

We used our connection stick to demonstrate how we are all connected, as part of the 4 spiritual connections we have in the world; ourselves, others, the world and beyond.

We completed a spiritual activity with each class, from friendship zips, to appreciating God's creation to calm down jars. 

We finished our sessions with a prayer, allowing each class to reflect upon their activity and reminding them how we can be spirituality connected.

CDAT Spirituality Workshop

We attended a workshop at Brereton C Of E Primary School to work with other Ethos groups from our CDAT trust to develop our understanding of Spirituality and how we can promote this in our school. We created a 'Spirituality backpack' which we took back to school, ready to use with our classes.