Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
'Corinthians 1:3-4'
Our school was built in 1908 and designed by Robert L. Curtis. Since then, we have maintained strong links with St. Edmund’s Parish which has served our community since 1874. In 2000 we celebrated the opening of the new parish building on the same grounds as the original church. This building continues to serve our school community today.
Our school prayer is at the centre of our daily school life and collective worship. All pupils learn and regularly recite the school prayer.
St Edmund’s School Prayer by our Student Council
Dear God,
Thank you for our school.
Help us to learn in peace with the help from our patron saint, St. Edmund. Thank you for giving us the ability to learn through your grace.
Help us to work hard and be kind to everyone.
Thank you for our teachers, families and friends.
Collective worship at St. Edmund’s provides opportunities for spiritual growth and development through participation in a variety of forms of worship and all forms of prayer – formal, informal, spontaneous, private, shared, petitionary and meditative.
We aim to help the children value and respect the power of prayer and to use it to help strengthen the children’s relationship with God.
We want to be a praying community. It is important for children to know the ‘formal’ prayers of the church which we may all pray together and which we all hear and say with the parish / family communities outside school.
We also value ‘formal’ prayers which have been written especially for children and which hold meaning for them. With these two aspects in mind, we aim to teach particular prayers to the children.
Children are encouraged to develop their individual prayer life through daily participation in collective worship, grace before meals and afternoon prayer.
Prayer does not only mean ‘formal’ prayers. We do hope to help each other to listen to God speaking to us and to respond in our hearts and minds during moments or stillness, reflection and silence.
We also encourage prayer writing by the children themselves. Each class has a special Prayer Book which the children take turns to take home and write a prayer inside with their family.
Each class also has a prayer area, which provides a focus for prayer in the classroom. Opportunities for prayer arise often from the current RE scheme, ‘Come and See’.
At St. Edmund’s, the children are taught to know the following prayers:
At St. Edmund’s we have a programme of regular worship, including:
- Regular class prayer times
- Regular Child led class worship
- Weekly school worship and Gospel Assemblies
- Whole school Masses
- Recognising and celebrating Catholic Feast days in the Liturgical calendar
- Class Masses
- Class Assemblies
- Key Stage assemblies and worship
Worshipping in Church
Gospel Assemblies
Hymn Practice and School Choir
At St. Edmund’s we also emphasise the importance of music as a way to unite ourselves to the Church and worship God. We use church music creatively to enrich the prayer life of the school through hymn practice sessions as well as through the school choir.