Pastoral Care & Wellbeing

Pastoral Care is concerned with promoting students’ personal and social development and fostering positive attitudes. Through the Pastoral Care arrangements and provision, the school demonstrates its continuing concern for its students as individuals, actively encouraging them to be secure, successful and fully participating members of the school and its wider community. Pastoral Care is also concerned with preparing students for the demands and challenges of adult and working life.

The importance placed on the Pastoral Care of our students is reflected by, and embedded within, our vision:

To educate to the highest standards Catholics, Protestants and others of goodwill, of all abilities, together.

Our integrated ethos is expressed in the commitment to be one community who learns and worships together based on the principles of equality, respect, reconciliation and service to others.

In order to further these aims the College recognises that the whole school staff, students, parents and wider community must work together consistently. Mutual support, respect and good communication is also essential in this regard.

All members of the school community are expected to work together in order to create and maintain an atmosphere that is calm and safe and which enables students to learn and teachers to teach.

Lagan College is also a health promoting school.  It teaches areas of health education and strives to protect and improve the health of those within it.  The school provides a secure and stimulating environment which encourages students to be health and safety conscious.  It makes provision for students to take initiatives and exercise responsibility.

Our Pastoral Care and Welfare practice links with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by taking into consideration the below articles of the UNCRC.

• Article 19: Governments should ensure that children are properly cared for, and protect them from violence, abuse and neglect by their parents, or anyone else who looks after them.
• Article 20: Children who cannot be locked after by own family must be looked after properly, by people who respect their religion, culture and language.
• Article 23: Children who have any kind of disability should have special care and support, so that they can lead full and independent lives.
• Article 24: Children have the right to good quality health care, to clean water, nutritious food, and a clean environment, so that they will stay healthy.
• Article 32: The government should provide ways of protecting children from work that is dangerous, or might harm their health or their education.
• Article 36: Children should be protected from any activities that could harm their development.
• Article 39: Children who have been neglected or abused should receive special help to restore their self-respect.

There is also good liaison with parents, outside agencies and specialist services to advise, support and contribute to the promotion of health within the school.  Pastoral Care is an integral part of the whole educational experience offered to our students and is not a distinct entity. It underpins every aspect of the students’ experience in school, and exists, not for its own sake, but to enable students to achieve their potential.