I am the very best of me…

Claire Jemmett, English and Assistant Head of Learning Support

Making you the best you can be requires dedication, commitment and importantly a “human element”. The best you can be is not just about the grades and scores you can get, the tries you can score or the friends you can have on Facebook. It is about developing and fulfilling you as a person. This “human element” is extremely obvious in schools but do we really notice them or are we caught up in the more obvious, academic and subject based success?

I am amazed daily at how widespread the “human element’ is. From the chronically shy child, struggling against their fear to allow themselves to be noticed by the world, to the sports star who battles but commits to those academic subjects they find hard. The friends that create laughter, enthusiasm and life-long bonds but who also provide support, comfort and realism with one another. From the staff members who go above and beyond daily to educate, guide and support each child, despite their behaviour, dislike of a subject and those pesky hormones. Each and every day, the best of someone in the school is shown, whether it is applauded in assembly or valued by the person who has stopped to help you pick up your fallen books.

Nowhere is this more evident than in learning support, a community within the wider community of the school. Often perceived as a department for only a few, we are visited by many, from all walks of life. Learning support, like the rest of the school, values the individual for who they are, as well as who they could and hope to be. It is a place that pushes each person, staff and pupil to do better, to be better. Here they find everything from a helping hand with a disorganised folder to a tissue and an encouraging word for those more stressful/emotional moments. The values of making you the “best you can be” are burning bright, as students help each other, teach each other, celebrate, commiserate and guide each other. The whole person, achievements big and small, as well as failures to be learnt from, are used as building blocks for the majestic form that becomes each Grovian student.

In a school this size it is an amazing delight that such a diverse group of people work happily to the common goal of helping each other succeed. It is their heart, at the core of the school that forms the foundation to enable every student to be their best.