Passion and Care

Across the ASSET family of schools and central team we have three drivers or "enablers" that will help us move towards our strategy. They are:

• Making Space

• Improving through Ownership and Collaboration

• Celebrating Passion and Care

The first two - Making Space and Improving through Ownership and Collaboration - drive they way we behave collectively, and are about the conditions that leaders create to encourage people to connect and grow, and in so doing help us achieve our ambitions for children, our schools and community. You will see these drivers threading through our approach to our networks, professional learning and approach to providing frustration free central services.

The latter - Celebrating Passion and Care - focuses very much on the value that individuals bring in their relational work with children, families and other staff. We work hard to recruit people who demonstrate passion and care, and we are making a commitment in our strategy to work harder still to celebrate it everywhere, valuing our people's intrinsic motivation, never taking it for granted, and modelling to our children what humanity looks like at it's best.

It's important to define these words in our own terms, as they're used frequently in education circles.

At ASSET, when we talk about passion, we reference particularly our values of excellence and engagement. Passion is the joy and excitement of learning, discovering, sharing knowledge. It's the taste of excellence that comes from intense pride in work we produce as adults, and in the moment that children see that they can produce more than they expected they were able to do. Passion drives us to find out more, research, read voraciously and talk about the subjects that we can't leave alone. It's the addictive moment in learning when the penny drops. It's the joy of hearing a child speak excitedly about the things that matter to them, whether that's football, dinosaurs or cycling. It's the shared moment in a room of educators when we bring together ideas about how we can unlock children's love of learning.

When we talk about care, we mean several things. Care is a diligence, that speaks of mastery and craftsmanship. It's about improvement, feedback, reworking. While it doesn't always ignite us like passion, it still brings us closer to that same feeling of pride in excellence. But care can also mean resilience, a dedication that picks us up when we find things are hard, and keeps us moving towards our goal. For educators it can mean time spent working through the barriers to children's learning, finding ways round a landscape of limited resources and keeping faith in children when they have lost it in themselves. When we talk about care we particularly reference our values of equity and empowerment.

Passion and Care is what makes us ASSET People.

In February 2025 we dedicated our Newsletter to stories about the passion and care of our staff - take a look!