From our Christian inspiration, we’re working on a hopeful human image
V. Scheppers has always emphasized that each young person is valuable. From our evangelic task to help our fellow-men, we‘re still challenged to offer youngsters chances to develop themselves. Thus our schools are spaces where the personnel can inspire this Christian life attitude and where they can bring it over to others. They encourage young people to make these basic principles also theirs.
At school we meet those young people in their growth to adolescence. This complex idea mustn’t be a source of irritation: we even accept our pupils as searching young people! A special care goes to those who have questions, obstacles or vulnerability.
The spontaneous and enthusiastic dynamism with which we want to believe in them and the thrust and the responsibility we dare give, becomes so sensible and clear. This daily taking care makes our education project sensible for the pupils. That’s the way parents’ wishes and educational skills meet.
Likewise youngsters dare to work for their future in a hopeful and resilient way. We coach them by stimulating them with dilemmas and choices that youngsters also have to make. At the same time we must reach them norms and show them lasting and justified life choices. This engagement makes the Scheppers schools very accessible learning and living surroundings for young people; with those efforts we also cooperate to a hopeful future for the next generations.
We strive after an integral and education full of quality
We want our parents and our pupils to choose for our Scheppers schools because we guarantee a solid, interesting and careful education. This also means that young people can discover and develop with us their intellectual, psychical, spiritual, corporal, musical, communicative and social capacities. Thereby we are the witnesses of the origin and the resilience, but also of the vulnerability and the restrictions of the youngsters they trusted us.
This integral accompaniment translates itself very expressively in the constant searching for a justified balance in our educational handling. This always forces us to reflect on our relational acting. Thus, we’re striving day after day for a healthy balance between releasing and leading, between correcting and sanctioning, between seriousness and humour, between studying a relaxation.
The contribution of diverse services and external professionals are in favour of the illustration of the teaching contents. As an illustration of the wishful attitudes in the present social reality, they search for encouraging testimonies and examples of a good practice.
This constant attention for integral education demands of every co-operator a large vigilance in the reaching, verbalizing and living on with the correct attitudes. That’s the way we’re trying to educate youngsters to become able in relationships, positive-critical, solitary and social- engaged as well as cheerful adolescents.
We offer chances to every child
Children distinguish themselves by personal thoughts and feelings, values and norms, certainties and doubts, talents and restrictions. The ensemble of talents, environment, own initiative and surrounding influences give them the possibility in developing unique personalities.
In our schools we recognize and accept every young person in that growth to authenticity and young adolescence. We strive for a dynamic social life where teaching and contacts between youngsters and adults, permanent cultivation and education are brought together in harmony.
Our founder V. Scheppers has showed us an obvious care for youngsters with specific needs. That’s why we pay special attention and care to youngsters with learning difficulties and /or with physical or mental problems. By our interested presence, our emotional care and our strongly made care offer, we try to offer an answer to the care questions that reach us through parents, pupils and other helping assistants. If our own knowledge is not enough, we’re searching for another educational method and a careful one that fits for the pupil.
In those long years of cooperation with pupils and their parents, life at school already shapes a very meaningful period itself. The enormous possibilities to devotion and engagement are valuable chances to personality development. They give sense and dynamism to the youth years of our pupils. Obviously, they have an undeniable impact on the development of values and attitudes that are necessary in later relationships in a family, a job environment or an engagement in social life.
We act from a thoughtful involvement
The most important challenge of our educational project in the Scheppers schools is that we want our pupils to be near in an honest and interesting way, every day. This attitude makes it possible to stimulate a positive attitude with youngsters in every school situation, to take care of them, to work up and to detect new needs and cares.
Unconditionally, we choose for an intensive presence policy: we don’t live next to our pupils, but with them. An honest interesting approach becomes a basic attitude in which we realize the essence of our educational work: support youngsters, guide them and stimulate them. Interest for what occupies them puts up to engagement, to devotion for fellow pupils and to a cheerful attitude.
Combined with clearly verbalized rules, we urge youngsters to the desired study and to a relational correct attitude without too many sanctions. So, an obvious corrective and sanctioning attitude is unnecessary. This permits us (like V. Scheppers himself lived), to be very careful with authority.
As teachers who are close to their pupils and educators, we can also become better teachers: we have a richer image of every youngster and we’re capable of a more differentiated and justified judgment.
Every class group is a learning lab for social abilities in which youngsters are positively challenged. Order discipline, punctuality, cleanness and silence are attitudes that are absolutely necessary for the realization of a positive class atmosphere. They are the expression of mutual respect in the whole class situation.
The pauses as well as the informal contacts before, during and after school are part of the school life. These moments of gathering daily offer chances to develop correct communication forms and attitudes. In this way teachers and pupils support everybody’s wellness. It is part of our job to accompany them and to show them how to live: we offer them structure, direct them and offer them a study place and a living space. In this way they build up the resistance they need to succeed in later studies and in a later job environment.
Our union offers a mutual handholdt
The extension of teaching and education in our schools is to be considered as a shared responsibility. The explicit choice for a collective and intense availability for our pupils signifies a surplus value that permits us to realize the education project of the Scheppers schools in the Flanders. We consider our educational acting as a teamwork that can only succeed when there is unanimity in vision on study purposes, educational methods, in rules and in keeping order.
The daily manners also have an influence on the wellness and the educational climate in which youngsters are trusted to us. In that respectful dialogue youngsters can find the basis in our schools to build to their happiness and their unique personality in a hopeful and dynamic way.
Besides that, pupils and parents also need clearness. That’s why we have to communicate sufficiently enough our expectations, our regulations and our rules of judgment with them. The lines of force of our pedagogic acting ought to be pointed to so that pupils and parents can find a handhold concerning the why and the wishes.
Besides that we, parents and pupils, have a great openness to work together to become a positive study and life climate at school. And that’s why we involve them maximally in consultative bodies in lots of school activities.
The union and the unanimity in all ranks enforce our success in that way and also offer a handhold and clearness to all of them who feel involved in our pedagogic project.