Welcome to Bulletin #7
For many schools locally, today (Friday 17th) is the final day of this half-term. We have another week to go, which we make back by still having the nice long Summer holiday. Let’s hang on in there next week! I was out for my usual Thursday social with another Transform head last night. While he was pretty pleased – annoyingly smug even – to be breaking up today, he was quick to point out the disruption and setback to learning that the longer break causes and would gladly swap back to what we do.. I’ll still envy him on Monday morning, mind!
Thanks to all for the great efforts with attendance so far his year. Despite a lot of nasty bugs doing the rounds, attendance has held up well. Lots of children are showing real resilience too, turning up when feeling a little bit out of sorts and getting on with it. There has been a particularly unpleasant strain of flu or Covid in circulation, but we’re hoping we’re through the worst of this. Our sympathy if you’ve had it – after the initial horrible first week, it seems to hang around annoyingly for at least a month after.
Thanks also to all for the wonderful, generous donations to our Harvest Festival appeal. As has become traditional, we are able to send of a great load of supplies to Hope, our local foodbank.
More thanks, this time to all who have taken the time to complete our survey on English as an additional language. This is important contextual information for us in a number of ways. Most importantly, it’s great to know our community and children better and to celebrate other languages. More pragmatically, when we are compared statistically to other schools – by Ofsted for example – EAL is a big factor. We were previously being compared to schools with very low levels of EAL, which was disadvantaging us in comparisons. Now we are able to submit a truer picture of our context, we should get fairer comparisons. As we suspected, with this data capture, we have moved from significantly below average EAL to significantly above! Your help is much appreciated and it’s not too late to let us know if there is another language used in your family: https://forms.office.com/r/iNSc7g9ez9
All staff reported on meeting lots of lovely families at parents’ evenings; your friendliness and warmth is always appreciated. We have a great community here, something very special. Mr Pattison enjoyed getting his pinny on and looked busy at his cafe!
Mr H