House News

Each half-term, every tutor nominates a student from their class for a House Award based on meeting one or many of the following criteria:

• Showing great character
• Making an outstanding contribution to college life
• Academic success
• Excellent extra-curricular performance
• Good attendance and punctuality

Why do we focus on character at DESC?  Well, in short, because we want to develop our students into great people.

We achieve this by highlighting their strengths of character. Students learn about the 24 components of character in GROW (Getting Ready for the Outside World) lessons (click here to view). In these lessons, students complete a survey to determine their unique character profile, which highlights the elements which come naturally to them.

If you wish to learn more about the survey or complete it yourself, more information can be found HERE:

https://www.viacharacter.org/survey/account/register

We appreciate that everyone is different, so students are encouraged to work towards goals that are complimentary to their own profile. This includes researching future subjects or careers in which their strengths of character are most valuable.

In addition to the House Awards, we have updated our school rewards system to echo the importance of character development. All staff are issuing ‘rewards’ to students based upon students demonstrating one of the 24 character strengths. Teachers are ‘strength spotting’ and praising students for being the best version of themselves. The rewards are tracked by the pastoral teams for additional recognition, as well as contributing to the House point totals and other prizes over the academic year.

We hope that your sons and daughters are already able to share examples of when they have been praised for receiving a character reward. If not, don’t worry, we have had a video assembly this week to highlight the initiative and see the benefits soon.

Mr Eoghan Kerr

Head of Earth House