Welcome to Lipson.

I am proud to be the headteacher of a school that puts itself at the very heart of our community. My vision for the school is not complicated, it can be summed up in three words:

People.

Quality.

Achievement.

We believe in valuing our people and putting them first. This starts with our students, whose best interests shape every decision we make. However, we also look after and cherish our amazing staff and welcome the contribution of our parents.

We insist on the highest quality in everything we do. We have extremely high expectations in every aspect of our work and will do things only if we can do them to a really high standard. In order to do this, we sometimes have to say ‘no’ to things.

The raising of student achievement is our core purpose, our reason for being. We are preparing our students for their adult life, so they need to leave us with the very best set of academic results of which they are capable. However, we also see achievement in its widest sense, which is why we put so much emphasis on areas such as sport, music and the performing arts, as well as trips and visits. Our wider curricular programme of clubs and activities is impressive and covers an incredible range.

At Lipson, we like to keep things simple wherever we can. We are proud of the behaviour and attitudes of our students and we achieve this in two ways. We place an emphasis on the quality of the relationships between staff and students and we believe that kindness should underpin everything that we do. However, we also have a crystal-clear set of expectations and standards which are demonstrated by our Code of Conduct. We ask our students to be:-

Prepared

Engaged

Respectful

Kind

There is little room for ambiguity with such a simple mantra and this is backed up with a similar set of principles for our staff, all of whom we expect to demonstrate:-

Professionalism

Expertise

Responsibility

Kindness

We are an ambitious school and rather than celebrate our many successes, we still strive to be even better. The progress of our students is something that we are very proud of but, alongside academic excellence, the welfare and well-being of our students and staff is central to our culture. We have traditionally been part of the co-operative movement and their core values such as democracy, self-help, equality and social responsibility still very much influence our way of working.

Quite simply, we believe that every student is good at something; our job is to find out what it is and enable them to fly.

Martin Brook, Headteacher