How we benefit our communities

We hope that through the character development work we engage in with our students, we work in partnership with families to help our students understand right from wrong, develop a ‘moral compass’, show empathy, respect and tolerance. We hope that they become citizens who understand the world around them, understand themselves and can see where they fit in – where they have a part to play and how they can both give to and receive from the local community around them.

Through the education our students receive, they are gaining knowledge and expertise which will equip them to contribute to their community economically through their employment decisions in due course.

Through the experiences they receive and the focus on our Aldridge Attributes, we hope that our students are becoming creative, curious, problem-solving, risk-taking – and developing interests that will enable them to enrich the lives of those round about them.

Beyond this work that is going on day to day in our school communities, there are a range of ways we already seek to benefit our communities. Here are some of them:

• We offer adult learning to our Portslade, Hove and Brighton community through Aldridge Adult Learning. With a mix of community learning and accredited courses, we aim to provide for everyone at their point of need, with a focus on reaching out to those who want to ‘catch up’, re-train or enrich their lives in some way.
• We run our Sir Rod Aldridge Cricket Centre, based at BACA, which serves not just our students, but the wider community too. Students from local schools have the opportunity to visit the centre, local cricket clubs can book to use the space and BACA is becoming a home to Sussex Cricket in a range of ways that do the community good.
• Our schools offer their space for community lets for a range of different purposes over the course of the year, making both specialist facilities and general space available at a reasonable price for community use.
• We partner with other local schools at more than one of our sites, ensuring that students with particular needs have a local base to call home.
• We host a community library on one of our sites and are always happy to look at evident needs and gaps in community provision and work with local authorities to find creative solutions, where possible.
• We aim to work with other local groups so that collectively, we are greater than the sum of our parts. For example, our BACA school community worked with community-run pub The Bevy in Brighton to provide free meals to people who struggled during lockdown due to job loss and other reasons. We want to build more links such as these within our various geographical locations.