At Albyn School, boys and girls feel safe and at home; the perfect environment for curious minds to benefit from a broad academic curriculum.
The school loves to nurture young minds, develop their knowledge and skills and build their character to enable them to succeed and be able to face the challenges of the 21st century.
Mission
Albyn’s aim is to develop the whole pupil – head, hand and heart. Teachers go above and beyond the narrow confines of exam syllabuses and educate children and young people for life, instilling in them a love of learning which will enable them to be lifelong learners.
They see it as a key part of their mission to prepare pupils for the many challenges they may face in the future, as well as preparing them for work or a career.
Albyn ethos
The Albyn ethos breeds a positive attitude towards learning: Pupils want to excel and they develop high aspirations for the future.
Their great exam results are the by-product of an Albyn education, rather than the main objective.
Because pupils enjoy learning, they achieve great things, and when they are faced with challenges, staff help them to see these as opportunities to learn and grow, and through them, become a better, more resilient person.
Vision
Part of the school’s vision is to offer the opportunity for pupils to seek fulfilment and enrichment beyond the classroom.
Pupils are offered, and encouraged to take part in, an incredibly rich and wide co-curricular programme – for example, Albyn is the only school in Aberdeen to have an orchestra.
With an expectation that all pupils will take part in at least two co-curricular activities, they also have exceptionally high participation rates with many pupils involved in musical, sporting, artistic or cultural activities every day.
In primary years, pupils have an array of co-curricular activities to choose from which are built into their day with the innovative ACE (Albyn Curriculum Enrichment) programme that takes place three times a week.
Key values
It is vital that children and young people grow and develop within a strong values framework.
At Albyn they have five core values – kindness, confidence, resilience, happiness and respect.
These are the golden glue that bond the community together and it is this sense of community and belonging that are vital to the wellbeing of children and young people.
It is also this sense of community that is immediately evident on visiting Albyn, where high standards of behaviour and appearance as well as pupils with a strong sense of self-control and self-discipline are very much the norm.
Albyn wants pupils to grow up within a strong moral framework that has values at its core.
The staff believe pupils should be happy and successful in that order with our aim being to build confident learners who are strong and able to take on life’s challenges and the bumps in the road that inevitably come along.
Working together
The community is one built on kindness, mutual respect and tolerance. They celebrate the wide diversity of ethnicities, languages and backgrounds that are to be found among the truly international pupil, staff and parent community.
The vision and values are lived every day and are shared widely and deeply by all who learn, work and teach at Albyn.
In recent pupil, parent and staff surveys, values were commented on frequently, with one parent of P4 and P6 children remarking that: “Albyn’s values are much more genuine and integrated into the way that the school community operates.
“This creates a very positive environment for children to grow up within.”
Register for the next Open Event on Friday September 17 at the Albyn School website.