Why BPL?
We want our graduates to flourish in their adult lives as God intends. We want them to come to love Him, know Him, be useful in His Kingdom, and to achieve the purpose for which they have each been created. To flourish and to achieve, our graduates need to be equipped with a vast amount of knowledge and knowhow, but more importantly in today’s, or in fact tomorrow’s world, they will need to be capable individuals, with a broad range of skills and dispositions. These skills and dispositions are the focus of the Building Purposeful Lives (BPL) framework.
The need for our Building Purposeful Lives (BPL) framework derives from the conviction that:
- Education is about growing the capacity of students to fulfil their God given purpose to Love God and Love others
- Education is for all young people;
- Education aims to prepare students for life;
- Too many students are not served well by schools;
- Education should equip students with the skills they need for the uncertainties, complexities, and perpetual change of the 21st Century; and
- Students’ educational ability is not fixed and can be developed.
It is common for teachers in the P-12 sequence or teachers of various Secondary subjects to use different terminology to describe the same concept. It is even more common for educators and parents to do this. When this takes place students commonly build separate learning silos, unable to make what we assume will be obvious connections. For example, where ‘perseverance’ is an issue for a child in Mathematics, they may not connect this struggle to the ‘stickability’ lessons their Art teacher taught them that led to successful development of their drawing skills. They are even less likely to connect these lessons to the ‘harden up’ lessons that their football coach has been teaching them. BPL will standardise the language used in each student’s life, definitely by the many teachers with which they interact, and hopefully with their parents and carers as well.