St Mary’s Primary School

Live Life, Love Learning

Guided by God

For more than a century, St Mary’s Church of England Primary School has served generations of families in Chessington. With seven classes and a pre-school Nursery, the school is small enough to retain a family atmosphere, but large enough to offer full challenge and opportunity to all children.

As a church we are delighted to have a strong relationship with St Mary’s Church School. We do this in a number of ways including:

• School Governance: Both the vicar and a number of our church members are active members of the Governing body.

• Wednesday Morning Assemblies (Collective Worship): The vicar of St Mary’s leads a weekly school assembly on most Wednesday mornings. These are primarily based upon the Church Calendar (Christmas, Easter, Harvest etc), the School’s Christian Ethos Statement ‘Live Life, Love Learning: Guided by God’ and Christian Values: Respect, friendliness & Helpfulness, Trust, Fairness, Stickability, Team Work, Forgiveness, and Thankfulness.

• Friday morning Open the Book Collective Worship: On a Friday morning a small team of volunteers from our church lead a story telling assembly programme called ‘Open the Book.’ The aim of this is to make the Bible come alive for the children by dramatising well known stories from both the Old and the New Testaments. Each Bible Story takes the form of a 10 –15 minute presentation. All of the first year stories are taken from ‘The Lion Storyteller Bible’ written by Bob Hartman, and gives an overview of the Bible from Creation to the Ascension. Years 2 and 3 contain modules of themed stories, for example: “The First Christians”; “Children Play their Part”, “Meals to remember.”

• Supporting Religious Education & Church Visits: It is always a pleasure to go into school to help support the teaching of Religious education or to welcome different school classes to church to learn about the purpose of the church, the history of the church and the symbols of the Christian faith.

• Christmas, Easter and other Special Occasions: We take great delight in welcoming the school to our church for special services such as the School Christmas Carol Services, Easter Services and Harvest Celebrations.

• First Sunday Worship: Children from the school regularly take part in our First Sunday All Age Worship.

As a church we look forward to sustaining and further developing these strong links into the future.