Published February 4, 2022
This week has given me the opportunity to appreciate the wider life of the school.
As I nipped out of my office on Tuesday at the end of the school day, I made a beeline for the hall where adventurous Year 7 & 8 pupils were busily and excitedly setting up the trampolines for their club.
I then popped outside to see Year 7 boys working on their football skills (one scored an absolute peach of a goal that even Coutinho would be proud of!).
I did the same on Wednesday too – it was a real joy to see a fabulous turnout of Year 9s for basketball club and also a healthy number of girls at netball club (which consisted of a gym session this week too!). There were lots of smiles and enjoyment being had!
Both evenings, when heading back to my office, I bumped into some dedicated year 11 pupils who had been at maths revision and PD revision and, on Thursday, also HA pupils who had been having revision sessions with 6th formers from South Wilts. It’s so great to see the Yr11s taking their exams so seriously and their desire to do well!
Enrichment
These encounters made me momentarily forget about the impact of the pandemic and gave me a sense of school being ‘normal’ again! There’s been a lot of talk in the media about lost learning (and we are as a school, as we always do pandemic or not, work hard ensure that gaps are plugged and pupils progress), but, for me, it’s the lost experiences that rile me the most. We’ve had cancelled sports days, cancelled weekly house competitions, cancelled trips to the theatre, a cancelled ski trip, and the annual rewards trips haven’t run for the past two years.
Rest assured, we are working and planning hard to ensure that our enrichment programme for the remainder of the year (and beyond) offers lots of opportunities for the pupils to develop outside of the classroom. Just this week, conversations have been taking place regarding:
- Reinstating the weekly House Competitions
- Enrichment days in the summer term
- House competition day in the summer term
- Foreign trips in 2023; Battlefields trip to Belgium and a cultural trip to Barcelona
- Reward trips (pupils have also had a chance to vote on their preferred venues).
Clubs
Clubs are back and running and the latest programme of clubs can be found on our website. There’s something for everyone! More clubs are being added all the time too, so keep checking for updates!
Safer Internet Day
Tuesday 8th February is Safer Internet Day and we’ve developed an eSafety page on our website to help you as parents and to help guide our pupils. The page contains lots of useful links and resources to help us all navigate the online minefield. The theme for this year’s day is ‘All fun and games? Exploring respect and relationships online‘.
From gaming and chat to streaming and video, young people are shaping the interactive entertainment spaces they are a part of. Safer Internet Day 2022 celebrates young people’s role in creating a safer internet, whether that is whilst gaming and creating content, or interacting with their friends and peers. Click here to check out the useful resources!
The Big Sleep
We’ll be proudly taking part, once again, in Alabaré’s Big Sleep this year on 4th March. The event will be open to all pupils who are aged 14 and over and will raise money and awareness for the charity who seek to end homelessness.
This year Alabaré are offering everyone special socks as their fundraising prize – each participant wins a pair of very natty socks and the company who Alabaré are buying them from, then donates a pair to a homeless person.
Next week, we’ll be actively recruiting our Big Sleepers for 2022.
Happiest Minute of the Week
As mentioned last week, we finish each working week with our Happiest Minutes of the Week. These are shared with the school community through the magic of live Teams feeds into classrooms and we want to share them with you too and shout out our celebrations far and wide – you can find the latest Happiest Minutes of the Week on our website homepage.
Achievement Points Race
The points are flooding in but there’s still no change on the leaderboard – this could all change though when the weekly House Competitions start up again!
- 1st Place: Margaret House with 29,889 points
- 2nd Place: Vincent House with 28,323 points
- 3rd Place: Teresa House with 26,800 points
- 4th Place: Francis House with 24,200 points
Have a lovely weekend!
Mr Rooney