How can we 'achieve infinitely more than we can dream or imagine' within our School Communities? Our Senior Executive Leader, Joe Richardson, contemplates how aiming for Gold isn't always the best plan.

When the GB Ladies hockey team gathered to prepare the path to the London 2012 Olympics, they had to decide what it was they were seeking to achieve.  The most obvious objective was to win medals, but this was not their ultimate goal.  No, their goal was to leave a legacy of inspirational memories that would inspire a generation of little girls to pick up a hockey stick and become the star of the future.  They wanted people to love what they loved.

On Thursday 10^th October, the Year 7 students at Cardinal Newman School in Luton gathered for their Welcome Mass shortly after the Feast Day of their patron, St John Henry Newman.  At the very start of that Mass there is a ceremony that sees their primary school headteacher pass on each student in their school to the staff at Cardinal Newman.  

They say, "I entrust the children of...to the community of Cardinal Newman School".  Those children entrusted to the school are then promised that they will be loved and that people in the school will do all they can to help them succeed.  In that moment there is a chain of memory between our schools, a chain of faith, a chain of love, a chain of hope for each young person.

And that is important.  St Paul talks about us being 'ambitious for the higher gifts' and in that expression he is talking about love and hope.  If we set our sights on goals that are defined by winning medals, the chances are we will end up winning nothing at all.  If, like the GB Ladies hockey team, we focus on something higher, we will 'achieve infinitely more than we can dream or imagine' - to take another lovely line from St Paul!

Trust and school improvement is, first and foremost, all about culture and establishing, virtues, character and charism within a community.  It is all about those higher gifts.  Anything we try to do without this work will fall on stoney ground and fail to take root.  

And, as a footnote, that brilliant hockey team went onto win a Bronze at 2012 and Gold in Rio in 2016 - results matter too, but they were made possible because of a higher ambition!