Community
As a specialist academy, our pupils do not all live in a traditional catchment area or local community of the school. Cloughwood pupils come from a wide number of areas throughout Cheshire West and East and even neighbouring counties.
This means that it is even more important for us as an academy to make sure that we have a very strong community spirit throughout all the groups attending the academy and that we are an outward-facing school. We have created a curriculum that goes out into the local communities of Hartford and Northwich to try to bring those local areas and its population into Cloughwood as much as possible.
Learning Outside the Classroom (LOTC) ensures that all of our pupils have regular learning experiences in the local area on a variety of topics. Our enrichment programme also has a heavy emphasis on activities within the local area, such as the church, other schools, gyms, outdoor spaces, local transport and shopping venues.
Our pupils do a lot of charity work and volunteering in the local community, like painting fences, litter-picking and flower planting. Courses like the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme provide opportunities for volunteering and community work.
We are always very keen to invite important local people to school, such as the community police liaison officers, the fire service, ambulance service, the Mayor and council members, pupils from other schools, and we are open to the public who are able to hire out our sports facilities. Our older pupils also have enjoyed many work-related learning experiences with local businesses – some pupils now work in local businesses as a result!
The addition and development of our sixth form will open up many more opportunities for our local community to benefit from in the future.
Our community is very important to us for these and many more reasons. Engagement in our community gives our pupils a real sense of purpose, belonging and identity, all characteristics that help them grow and develop into well-rounded, confident and considerate young people. We want to continue to focus on our place in our community and on ways of continuously improving our engagement within it.