Welcome to St Simon Stock Catholic School.

 

Our School

Our school was founded in 1967 and is one of five secondary schools in the Kent Catholic Schools Partnership. We provide a high-quality education for young people in the mid-Kent area and work closely, through an executive leadership model, with St Gregory’s School in Tunbridge Wells, which provides for the area to the west of the county.

 

St Simon Stock Catholic School is an 11 to 18 school, which admits 180 students in to each year group in Years 7 to 11, and has a thriving Sixth Form, which provides our students with a wide range of level three courses, including A Levels, BTECs and International Baccalaureate qualifications. Our school is located in a pleasant campus called Oakwood Park, approximately one mile to the west of Maidstone town centre.

We are a high achieving school with an excellent reputation, in which our students make excellent academic progress from their starting points when they join us at the age of eleven, or at the age of sixteen when they join our Sixth Form. In the past four or five years we have consistently achieved progress scores for GCSE and A Level, which ranks us as one of the highest achieving schools not just in Kent, but also nationally.

 

Our Ethos and Values

We are a Catholic school, and although our admissions criteria will prioritise children who are baptised Catholics, many of our children and staff are of other faiths, which is not a barrier to entry.

Our ethos and values are guided by Gospel values and our Catholic tradition. Central to this is our belief that each and every one of our students was created by God, with special gifts. We believe our role is to nurture and develop these gifts so that our students will reach academic excellence, and will lead a life of love and service to others.

 

We are a Lasallian Associate School

We are also a Lasallian Associate School and adopt the five core principles of the international network of Lasallian schools:

• Faith in the presence of God: an awareness of the living presence of God in our world, and a calling to see the world through the eyes of faith
• Concern for the poor and social justice: a calling to support the poor and victims of injustice, through community service and justice education
• Quality education: to provide an education that is second to none, so that our students will not just contribute to society, but will transform it
• Respect for all persons: that we are all children of God and, as such, at the heart of our education we must respect the dignity of all persons
• Inclusive community: we respect and value diversity, which means that nobody is left out or left behind, and that we embrace the unique stories and qualities that each of us bring to the world.

 

Our Mission: To ‘Work with Love’

Our mission is encapsulated by our motto, ‘Labora cum Amore’, which means to ‘Work with Love’:

• Our curriculum is a traditional one, in which students will work hard in subjects, which lead to high value qualifications, which have real currency for their employment prospects after they leave full-time education.
• We want our students to have the highest aspirations. We consistently teach our students that there should be no ceiling on their achievement. We believe that with a growth mindset all of our students have the potential to excel at everything they do. Our message to students is that their intelligence is grown through hard work, deliberate practice, and through a work ethos that welcomes a mistake as an opportunity to learn and to grow.
• We also believe that learning is not a functional occupation, undertaken purely in order to achieve qualifications, but is a life-long pursuit, which should be valued because it enriches our lives and builds our character.
• Our curriculum therefore is much more than just a series of time-tabled subjects, which leads to academic qualifications. We weave a thread through our curriculum, which purposefully links our subjects. This thread teaches students the life-long values of living a healthy, balanced, scholarly and spiritual life in which they will at all times be respectful to others, kind, appreciative, well-mannered, resilient, intellectually curious and persevering.
• We are an International Baccalaureate School. As such, we teach our students to have an international outlook, with a deep and meaningful understanding of other cultures and ideas. Our intention is to develop our students to be confident, self-motivated, balanced citizens, committed to life-long learning and personal growth, who will serve the common good and make our world a better place.
• We are an evaluative and developmental school, which will always aspire to reflect on our professional practice, so that as an organisation of professional educators, we will continue to grow and develop, to ensure that we provide our students with the world-class education that they deserve.

 

Jon Malone

Academy Principal

October 2020