How far will your dreams take you?

New year, new goals

We continually encourage the children to dream big dreams and set themselves goals to achieve those dreams. The start of this year has been no different. We thought about how having aspirations can help us to achieve our full potential; aspirations are our hopes and dreams of achieving something and if we have clear aspirations, it can help us plan to achieve our goals.

If we aspire to do or be something, it can help us to work out what steps to take to get there. It might also help us to keep motivated when things don’t go according to plan; our aspirations help us to develop ways to overcome obstacles.

We looked at aspirational people, people who had a goal and worked towards it, in spite of opposition.

Marcus Rashford is now a successful professional footballer. However, when he was a child, his family relied on free school meals and the kindness of others to keep them fed, despite his mum working extremely hard to support them. Marcus worked hard on his training to become a footballer, joining the academy system at just seven years old. During the COVID-19 lock down, he successfully persuaded the UK government to continue to provide food vouchers to children during the summer holidays, an incentive which is still supporting many families now.

Malala Yousafzai was determined to receive an education and was adamant to fight for her rights, and the rights of other girls, to go to school. Despite being injured by the Taliban and having to leave her home country, she continued both her studies and her campaign, becoming the youngest ever winner of The Nobel Prize. She achieved her goal and studied at Oxford University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

We saw that with these aspirational people achieved their goals by:

Setting high expectations
Thinking about the steps they needed to take to get them there
Being resilient! They kept going even when times were tough
They used their influence in a good way!

Using these and others as aspirational people who achieved their goals, we focused on the children’s goals for ‘future me’. ‘Future me’ allowed the children to think about where they would live, what job they would do and what sort of person they wanted to be. Children in Reception class spoke about getting better at gymnastics by training hard and going to their clubs each week – already a mindset for success!

Here are a few of the ‘future me’ aspirations that children have shared.