Dear Parents,
It has been great to catch up with so many people on the driveway over the last few days – and most importantly to see the children bouncing into school at the end of a long cold month.
If you happen to be in the front hall outside my office, you will be impressed by some great print work produced by Year 6. The attention to detail is super. (Mr Earley was supposed to remind me to say this after I thanked him!)
Monday’s Year 4 matches were an absolute joy to watch. The rugby was competitive and Mr Cook was mightily impressed by the progress the boys made through the match. The hockey was superb to watch, with loud support from the sidelines as the girls closed out an excellent win. It struck me at match tea on Monday how brilliant it would be for parents of Years R to 3 to have the opportunity to have ‘match tea’ together after school once in a while and spend time with each other – watch this space!
Site: The Grounds team have been hard at work clearing the hedges and fence lines and I hope you will be impressed by their work as the spring goes on – the volume they have stripped back is superb. We have a new maintenance assistant starting next week to get cracking with the various painting projects onsite.
We are delighted to be hosting Tech Century Camps over February half term which will be covering an exciting variety of STEM activities and look forward to welcoming Ultimate Activity Camps back in the Easter and Summer holidays. There is more information about both these camps further down in the newsletter.
We are interviewing for an additional Learning Support Assistant next week and have a great field – this additional appointment will ensure that we can provide more intervention support in Year 1 and Year 4 primarily, as well as in other years. The vision of academic rigour for all is underpinned by support, stretch and challenge for individuals. This appointment will help with this.
This Friday’s assembly focused in on Holocaust Memorial Day. I worked with the slides prepared by the Holocaust Educational Trust and the pupils listened to an amazing poem read by the actress Olivia Colman. The focus of the slides was on how a focus on difference can lead on to prejudice. Year 8 was great in explaining some of the dehumanising steps that preceded the Holocaust, from large things like taking away citizenship to small things like banning Jews from having phones or pets.
I hope you all have a very good weekend
Edward Bond
Headmaster