The Half term ahead
Welcome back to the start of 2022! We're excited to have our school community back with us for a fresh year ahead. Thank you for your support of us over the last year. We appreciate that, as we start the year, we thought it would be helpful to outline some of our plans with you.
Over the next few weeks we are undertaking a series of surveys to gather views and opinions from all of our stakeholders. This includes teachers, students, governors and of course our parents & carers. Like many schools we have had to manage challenges over the last couple of years that we could not have foreseen. However, our ambitions for your children never take a back seat. We are keen to ensure that our plans around school improvement continue to be driven by your needs, views and opinions.
School reports will be out over the next few days. These will be printed but we are looking to move over to a more environmentally friendly app at some point by the end of this academic year which will give you access, should you wish it, to other school information, like attendance, rewards etc. Please bear with us! If you would like to get in touch with the head of department about the information around the report, please do refer to the emails below. They will be able to respond best to any queries and make sure they reach the right member of staff within their team.
Ms Wildish |
English & Media |
Ms Kerr-Allen |
Maths & Numeracy |
Ms Hoare |
Ms Gladstone |
Mr Field |
Mr Georgiou |
(teacher i/c)Geography |
Mr Bevan |
Head of Performing Arts |
Ms McDermott |
Social Sciences |
Ms Ilobi |
Ms Peddie |
Head of Creative Enterprise |
We have continued updating infrastructure work on our IT over the holidays and behind the scenes. We've had feedback that some parents and carers feel they are struggling to get in touch with staff. Please note you can contact members of staff via their emails, if you do not have these directly, please make a note of these above.
Since September 2021, we've had builders on site working around our students to update some of our buildings around fire safety. This work is ongoing.
From September to December 2021, our students were invited to apply for our relaunched and revised Student Leadership group. Our first meeting will take place this week, and through this mechanism, we will use student leaders and class reps to drive forward improvements that students want. Congratulations to our Head students - Saara, Zoe and Martha. Watch this space for updates.
Year 7 have had workshops on anti-racism strategies last week - work around this, and other British values continue throughout their school time.
Year 8 are continuing with their whole year group literacy project and reader led by the English team. Their HPV vaccines will be complete for this year group by the end of today (11/1/2022)
Year 9 will continue with the options process this term - ultimately leading to their GCSE choices and their options evening on 8th Feb. Again, this is likely at this stage to be online as part of our reduction of large groups meeting.
Year 10 parents evening is also taking place. In line with our Covid management plans, these remain online for the foreseeable future. We will review this, and other online events as transmission figures dictate.
Government guidance has made clear that their intention at this stage is that exams will be taken by our current year 11. If this was to change at short notice, we have kept systems in place to revert to the previous teacher assessed systems. For now, year 11 remain focused on courses. We are rolling out the National Tutoring Programme which is partially funded by the government to ensure students can close gaps which may have occurred during isolation/ lockdowns. Students have been contacted for the first wave of this. A year 11 parents evening is scheduled to take place 10th Feb.
Finally, we keep on our website curriculum maps for our subjects and year teams. These allow parents to know what their child is learning, and see how it dovetails with other subjects or progression within the subject area. These are updated at regular intervals. Please do take a look here for subjects /189/subjects Here for the pastoral curriculum /248/our-curriculum
Wishing all a very happy 2022