Catholic Life

Worship

At Springhill Catholic Primary School, we are committed to providing a variety of opportunities for all children to know, love and serve God that will enrich their lives and help them to understand Catholic faith traditions, as part of our ever-changing world and the multicultural society in which we live.

Prayer and worship are primarily concerned with giving glory, honour, praise and thanks to God. It is our loving response to God’s invitation to enter into a relationship with Him, in word and action, made possible through the work of Jesus Christ and the witness of the Holy Spirit.

In line with both our legal requirement and faith commitments, prayer and worship takes place daily. It can take place in different forms; a single act of worship for all children in a key stage or separate acts of worship for individual classes or year groups.

Throughout the year, a carefully planned child-centred programme of prayer and liturgy is celebrated, taking into account key events in the Church’s liturgical calendar. It also considers Feast Days, world events, the work of groups such as CAFOD, inspirational people and recognises/includes other faith traditions.

During current restrictions, our collective worships are shared digitally so we can still worship together as a community albeit in our class bubbles.

Religious Education Newsletter

Little Prayer House

We have created a 'Little Prayer House' in the school grounds. This provides a calm, focussed oasis for prayer and reflection as a class or small group. Our pupil chaplains hold prayer groups for younger classes during their break times.

Please feel free to visit our prayer house before and after school, where you and your children can spend time reflecting or write a prayer in our Book of Prayerful Intentions.

School Prayers

We have a school prayer book which each child receives when they join us which outlines the main prayers we use across the school. This also covers prayers which are learnt in particular year groups as part of the God Matters curriculum.

Prayer Booklet

Church and Parish

Southampton Pastoral Area - Central & West

Springhill works closely with our local parishes – St Joseph and St Edmund, St Boniface and Immaculate Conception along with the Dominican Sisters of St Joseph.

Each year group has a pastoral advisor who makes regular visits to discuss Scripture and how, as Christians, we respond.

Year Group	Chaplain
F	Deacon Andy Philpott
1	Sr Veronica Brennan
2	Fr Antony Gatt
3	Fr Ansel D'Mello
4	Fr John Idio / Fr Emmanuel Osike Oyarekhua
5	Fr Tom Kleinschmidt
6	Fr Vincent Harvey

St Joseph’s and St Edmund’s is our local parish and we make visits to St Edmund’s Church as part of the R.E. curriculum and also celebrate Mass with the community. On the feast day of St Peter and St Paul (29th June) every year, the whole school celebrates Mass together in the church.

All of our parish priests contribute to chaplaincy meetings and provide worship, guidance and celebrations for us, in addition to supporting our RE curriculum.

The Dominican sisters from Sway, who run a weekly club 'Fanning the Flame', provide further support in developing the children's relationship with God, through prayer and song.

Links:

St Joseph's and St Edmund's Parish (City Centre)

St Boniface Parish (Shirley)

Immaculate Conception Parish (Portswood)

Dominican Sisters of St Joseph (Sway)

Our Diocese is the Diocese of Portsmouth:

Helping Others

Catholic Social Teaching inspires the Springhill Community to help others in our school, our community and further afield. As Catholics, we believe that it is our role to help others in need and care for the world we have been given.

Dignity

We ensure that everyone is treated equally with respect as we are all God’s creations. This is shown through our behaviour policy.

Our Language Ambassadors help children who do not have English as their first language to feel more included in the school community and our school council works together to help our school improve further.

Family, Community and Participation

We work closely with our community in many ways. We have recently collected for Poitiers Care food bank and families in need to provide food in these trying times. Our online Advent liturgy was shared with local care homes and used in St Joseph and St Edmund’s Parish Christmas services. Our choir has also helped raise money for different local charities by singing Christmas carols at the hospital and in the city centre.

Option for the Poor and Vulnerable

Each year, we try and raise money for different charities to help their work. Recently, charities we’ve collected for have included:

Royal British Legion- selling poppies
Shoebox Appeal - collecting shoeboxes for the Rotary Club of Southampton to distribute amongst less fortunate children in Albania, Montenegro, Moldova and Romania
CAFOD.

Creation and Environment/ Common Good

We try hard to do what we can to look after God’s Creation and we have a group of Eco-Warriors who help us with this.

This Christmas (2020), our 'eco-warriors' organised a food collection for the local food bank in lieu of sending Christmas cards.

“We worked out that if only ten people in each class gave out ten cards, that would be one hundred cards for each class in the school!

There are twenty-one classes, so we calculated that to be a total of two thousand, one hundred cards and envelopes!” Ella and Thea (Year 2)

“Thank you to everyone who gave food donations instead of Christmas cards. In our year group bubbles, we collected the food and packed it up on the last day of school before the Christmas holidays. Then, someone from Poitiers Care came to collect the food. This charity helps people in need in Southampton. The charity was very grateful.

We should all be very proud because we helped the environment and we helped people in need!” Eco -Warriors

In addition, we have a bird feeding station, we recycle what we can from paper to whiteboard pens and batteries and we are always looking for ways of producing less waste.