Catholic Social Teaching
At Our Lady and St Werburgh's, it is our desire to instill in our children a Catholic conscience and make them advocates for a better, fairer and more sustainable world. We believe that the principles of Catholic Social Teaching provide the basis for our children to develop their awareness of, and duty to, caring for the world that God created for us all. The nine principles of Catholic Social Teaching provide a framework by which we plan and deliver a Catholic curriculum that develops our children's social responsibility within the context of our faith, enabling them to learn how to live together as stewards of God's earth, working towards a common good. Our curriculum is very much designed through a Catholic lens, using a Big Question enquiry approach, to enable our children to ask questions of meaning and purpose, as outlined in the Big Questions below. Each term, we focus as a whole-school on different aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, so that the curriculum is progressive and builds upon children's prior knowledge and experience. This is also linked to the liturgical year, our whole-school worship calendar and Pope Francis's three key encyclicals: Laudate Si, Fratelli Tutti and Lumen Fidei.
The nine principles of Catholic Social Teaching that we use in our school, based on CAFOD's model, are:
- Human Dignity
- Common Good
- Stewardship/ Care for God's Creation
- Distributive Justice
- Option for the Poor
- Participation
- Promoting Peace
- Solidarity
- Subsidarity
These are represented in a series of child-friendly, multi-cultural images which we have adapted from images produced by United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Relief Services to use across the school. These images help illustrate the key principles to our children, are visible in displays and cross-referenced in RE, Prayer and Liturgy and the wider curriculum where relevant: