Head Teacher Message Archives - Page 4 of 39

Dear Parents and Carers

Myton’s second Young High Sheriff Award evening took place this week – a prestigious event bringing together the High Sheriff of Warwickshire, Mrs Karen Lynch MBE, the Mayor of Warwick Cllr Jackie D’Arcy, Cllr Cora-Laine Moynihan, members of the police and Myton staff to announce the results of our recent Young High Sheriff competition.

Congratulations to the winning candidate, Maya in Year 10, who will serve as Young High Sheriff for the day, shadowing the High Sheriff of Warwickshire in her duties on behalf of the King. Well done also to Neve and Anjie in Year 10 who were named as Under Sheriffs. This is a wonderful opportunity for all three students as they are given an insight into the High Sheriff’s work in the community and also have the chance to attend special events over the course of the academic year.

Thank you to all the students who entered the competition (they were all presented with a certificate from the High Sheriff). In doing so they demonstrated their interest and desire to make a difference in their community, one of our key CARE values.

Dear Parents and Carers

Thank you to all the parents who joined us Tuesday evening to discuss smartphone use. We had just shy of 400 people over the two sessions which is significantly higher than these sessions normally attract and this just goes to show how engaged Myton parents are – one of the many reasons I enjoy working here so much. Lots of questions after each talk both publicly and then more informally afterwards. It is important to hear what parents have to say about initiatives such as these so I’d also like to thank the parents who emailed in following these talks. I understand there was quite the debate on a local social media page (I’m afraid I didn’t see it as I don’t have any social media but my team gave me the highlights – I’m that old and out of touch to still think that discussions like these are why God gave us pubs ), it’s brilliant that it got people talking about smartphone use among young people. We have work to do and I’ll be in touch soon with next steps on our proposed policy.

Dear Parents and Carers

We have been lucky enough this week to welcome Justice in Motion into school – a physical theatre group who are passionate about art and social justice. They performed their show CODE to our Year 8 students. It was a visually spectacular performance packed full of bike stunts, dance, aerial acrobatics, rap and music. However, it was also a performance with an important message for our students about County Lines and knife crime with the story centring around a young person exploited by a drug crime gang. Thank you to all the performers (and a shout out to Molly from Year 8 who had a special cameo part).

Best wishes

Andy Perry

Dear Parents and Carers

Firstly, I’d like to thank parents for taking the time to volunteer to support Myton School becoming smartphone free. I am also delighted by the numbers signing up to attend our information evening on 21 October. There are now two sessions happening that evening due to demand and you can still sign up to whichever one suits your schedule through this link. I look forward to seeing you there and we will be sharing all the details of the policy and procedures in due course.

You will see from this week’s newsletter that we have been celebrating Black and British Culture through Black History Month. This theme has informed the assemblies this week where Mrs Zahran and Miss Smicle have reflected on their own heritage, Britishness and values. There have been events throughout the week, including a very well attended event after school on Tuesday hosted by the Guardian Ballers, which included a basketball and a performance workshop attended by over 70 pupils. We have more events planned.

Dear Parents and Carers

Over recent years we have gained quite a lot of experience at crisis management here at Myton; cyber attack, RAAC, travellers etc. However, crisis management is remarkably simple when it comes down to it – the key people gather around the table and I ask “can we keep the students safe?” And until the answer to this is yes, we go no further. We must do whatever we need to do to keep students safe, and until then, we don’t even consider to what extent we can teach them anything. In the case of RAAC we had to educate year groups at home and change all internal timetables and rooms to keep our students safe – caused massive upheaval for everybody but that’s what it took.

Some crises are less obvious and creep up on us and that is what has happened with children’s use of smartphones. I would describe the amount of harmful behaviour we see through smartphone use as a crisis; it is causing harm to children, affecting learning, causing behaviour issues including bullying, facilitating sexualised behaviour, leading to addictions including gaming and porn, draining this school and others of resources dealing with the consequences and it is changing the definition of childhood. I’m not alone in describing this as a crisis – numerous charities, police chiefs and most organisations working with kids do the same. Even the Tories are now campaigning for smartphone bans in school (remarkably more vocal on the subject now they’re in opposition, complete lack of backbone on it when they were in power – lets see if Labour have any more nerve).

Dear Parents and Carers

It was great to see so many of you at our Open Evening last night. It was a fantastic evening, and we were proud to showcase our school. There were fun activities going on in all departments, including cupcake decorating, giant doodling, never-ending story writing, giant scrabble and many more. A big thank you to all our students who volunteered as tour guides for the evening, to our staff and to all our visitors. Below are just a few of the photos from last night.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the evening using this feedback form that should only take a couple of minutes to complete.

Best wishes

Andy Perry

Dear Parents and Carers

Our pastoral curriculum theme this week has been democracy and it has been my turn to deliver assemblies on this topic. Assemblies have to be short to fit into tutor time so when planning them we have to be somewhat selective in what we focus on. One of the areas I wanted to unpack with the students was the extent to which they understood that there is legislation planned to reduce the voting age to 16 and whether they intended to exercise that right to vote.

Depressingly very few seemed enthused with the idea of voting despite my two-pronged attack of how many people have fought and died to bring power to the people in this country and how the only way of ensuring elected politicians listen to younger voters is to actually vote. Of course we will keep working on them about their responsibility to vote and engage in debate and all other aspects of democracy as the year goes on.

Dear Parents and Carers

Preparations are now underway in school for our Open Evening, which is taking place on Thursday 25 September, 5-8pm, with Head Teacher talks at 5.15pm, 6pm and 6.45pm. It’s a great opportunity for prospective pupils and their families to come and have a look around the school, meet current students (who do a wonderful job of being tour guides), and our exceptional departments and teachers. We look forward to seeing you there (no need to book, just turn up).

Best wishes

Andy Perry

Dear Parents and Carers

Welcome back to your children, it’s been nice to see them again and settle them back into school life. Thanks to them all, and you, for making such a positive start…they look great and are responding to our high expectations very well. Our new Year 7s are lovely, running around and getting lost but getting stuck into everything which is how it should be. It’s always nice to meet the Year 7 parents on the gate and watch as they try and hug their kids goodbye at the start of the day only for the child to bolt into school, completely ignoring their mum or dad because all parents are, of course, embarrassing.

I’d like to welcome all the parents of our new Year 12s this year. We know most of you of course but this year around 40% of our Year 12 are new to Myton and are making a great first impression over this week. It’s a record number of Year 12s for us and a sign of our flourishing success at Key Stage 5.