Vision and Mission
Dunalastair's Vision and Mission
Vision
Focusing learning processes on concepts, skills and attitudes will enable Dunalastair School to make a significant and lasting contribution to improving education in the country, with innovations that can be replicated and scaled up across the diverse realities that make up our education system. Hence, the motto of our educational proposal is Reimagine Learning: engagement and understanding! (Let’s reimagine learning: motivation and understanding!) – education with wisdom for the future.
Mission
To deliver a Lifeworthy education based on collaborative inquiry, which shapes creative, considerate young people who are responsibly committed to their environment and community.
Purpose, principles and values
Purpose
At Dunalastair, all our efforts are focused on preparing our students to face the challenges of an uncertain and constantly changing world. It is important that each of our students is challenged to give their best. Their potential cannot be wasted, and Dunalastair will seek to educate them in critical rationality that will shape individuals who can contribute to the advancement of their society.
Principles of humanist tradition
- A recognition of the role of reason and emotion in the process of knowing and understanding.
- Openness to other cultures, an open-minded attitude towards the world, non-discriminatory.
- Respect for others, which enables us to live in community, participate and collaborate with others in human activities.
- Celebrating humanity’s progress on various fronts: scientific, cultural, technological and ethical, encouraging students to become active participants in some area of this progress.
- Freedom, as a human value, seeking to enable our students to determine their own actions for themselves.
- The importance of fostering a critical spirit to assess the challenges and dangers that such advances may entail, and the shortcomings of their environment that can be improved.
- The appreciation of aesthetic sensitivity, in order to develop creativity.
- The responsibility to become a social agent who collaborates from their role, whatever it may be in life, with their community and their country.
Our values
The following values are central to Dunalastair’s identity and must therefore be embodied at all times by members of our community: teachers, staff, students, and parents.
The idea of fair play, or fairness, is a core value in British education, which understands life through the metaphor of sport, as multiple relationships between individuals and groups of people who are trying to achieve a common goal. In these relationships, it is necessary to adhere to shared norms that restrict our personal freedom, so that we can behave in ways that are predictable to each other (knowing what we can expect—and what we cannot expect—from each other). This reciprocal granting of freedom is how we recognise each other as individuals and members of a community, and it is the basis for mutual respect, honesty and fairness in our relationships, and consideration for others. This idea is greatly reinforced through sports, but it should be present in all school activities.
It is essential that our students develop inner strength from an early age, so that they have the discipline to break through inertia. It is about empowering each individual, through the practice of perseverance and order, so that they can experience a deeper and more permanent level of well-being, one that derives from the development of the cognitive, emotional and behavioural skills necessary to respond to the challenges we face in life.
Virtutis Gloria Merces, ‘Courage deserves glory’ is the school’s motto, and in a complex and demanding world, Dunalastair seeks to educate students who are able to recognise and overcome the difficulties they face, who know how to learn from problems and defeats, and who also know how to enjoy and grow in moments of success.
Creativity, innovation and the ability to carry out projects through actions that make them a reality are qualities that should characterise Dunalastair students.
Given its non-denominational character, Dunalastair has always welcomed a diversity of beliefs within its community, with the conviction that coexistence in diversity is an important value in itself. Furthermore, it educates for a life in which multiculturalism will become increasingly prevalent, and is therefore an essential value of democratic life.
On the other hand, co-education has been chosen because it is assumed that the world needs women and men who are capable of accepting their differences as an opportunity and understanding that female and male perspectives together enable us to successfully face life’s challenges.
Dunalastair has always sought a balance between intellectual education, moral training and physical health. For this reason, physical education and sport are a fundamental part of their curriculum. We seek to educate young people who value and protect their health, and who enjoy physical activity and sport.
Our students’ capacity for action and reflection on the needs of the community and the country, as well as taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions, is an important part of our educational work. The school must therefore be a space for reflection and dialogue aimed at finding alternative responses to the challenges facing a community.
In this way, developing team projects in which students have the opportunity to value collaboration in achieving group or social goals over purely individual ones, and to contribute constructively, becomes a fundamental objective.