At Regina Caeli Academy UK, we believe that faith is not something that can be added on to an education but is something that needs to be totally enculturated.
After all, we are not aiming just to keep children from leaving their faith, we are aiming to raise up the next generation of saints.
So, we work hard to cultivate a culture of virtue and faith.
Virtue
We use Don Bosco’s method of discipline, which aims to be preventive. Instead of just punishing bad behaviours, we want to encourage the good, especially the virtues.
Through this method, we reward virtuous behaviours and name them, for example, if a child behaves charitably towards another child. This is something we now see regularly from children who attend RCA.
Rewarding virtuous behaviour has built a virtuous culture, in which it really has become cool to be kind.
This is as important for our parents and tutors as it is for our children, as we must model virtuous behaviour for them.
Faith formation
We also take seriously the responsibility to form our students in their Catholic faith.
For example, our preparation for First Holy Communion runs throughout a whole school year and they then get to celebrate this together.
Our curriculum is infused with God and we provide catechesis throughout the school year.
Our priest chaplain also helps us to bring the faith to life for our students. He says Mass for us once a month, hears confessions, trains our altar servers, and helps us to celebrate the major feast days of the Church’s year.
All of these things we can see keep the faith alive for our students, as they are nourished by a culture in which having faith and behaving virtuously are just a normal part of everyday life.
