Welcome to Bulletin #41
Welcome to Bulletin #41Here we are – the last day of the 2024-25 school year. On behalf of the staff team, our thanks to all for your kindness and support over the year. On the subject of thanks, more of those for the fantastic response to the annual survey. After a start that can only be described as a ‘slow burn’, we ended up with an amazing number of replies – a new record, in fact! We’ll get onto looking at what it all says and means over the next couple of weeks and report back in September.
Overall, it has been a challenging but successful year. We will reflect on it and rest assured we will try to make Parkdale even better next year. Initial thoughts for our school improvement plan centre on:
Standards in Writing: our official outcomes are exceedingly good, but we think we detect a bit of a drop in overall quality of presentation and some areas of weakness around sentence construction.
Introducing a new digital programme to further support maths – problem solving largely – in Key Stage Two.
Early Years Attendance: this is a real concern for us, other schools in our trust and beyond. Too many children are missing too much of school in this crucial stage of their development.
Supporting children with English as an Additional Language: this is something we work very hard on now, particularly with support from Holly, our Speech and Language Therapist, but there’s room for improvement
More events to invite the community into; we’ve made real progress this year, but want to take this even further.
Renovating the Hall – it looks a bit tired and institutional. We have plans to bring it into the 21st century!
To round off. Firstly, our thanks to all who have helped out this year – we depend on volunteers for so many things and really appreciate those who help hear readers, accompany trips, help run events, Friends of Parkdale, coach sports, transport children to sports fixtures and all sorts more. Whatever it is you do – you’re great!
Finally, we would also like to bid a fond and teary farewell to our fantastic year six children, who leave us today. Good luck to them in their new schools. If their departure means you no longer have a child at Parkdale, thank you for all your support over the years and please come and see us at fairs and such-like. We’ll miss you as well as the children! Everyone else; we’ll see you in September… Have a safe and lovely Summer everyone.
Mr Hillier
Two Farewells
Two FarewellsWe are sure our community will join us in wishing all the very best to teaching assistant Julie Ross and Midday Supervisor Asmaa Jabeen, both of whom leave us this week.
Julie has given us many, many years of brilliant service and has supported countless children. She will be hugely missed and we wish her a very happy, well-deserved retirement.
Asmaa is off for a new role as a TA and we wish her well with this. Her coffee mornings will be greatly missed too!
Lack of Bulletins – an apology
We have realised that some parents and carers have not been receiving links to the weekly bulletin. This is an operator error (for which read ‘Mr Hillier not fully understanding our new app and clicking the wrong delivery option’). Hopefully, everyone will have received this bulletin and we’ll get that right going forward. Our apologies for any inconvenience caused and thanks to those who have kindly made us aware.