Dear Parents & Carers
Three days ago we passed the anniversary of the start of the first lockdown. On the anniversary, I met with a couple of lads in Year 10 who I felt were not working hard enough and I went through their last year of learning with them. To be fair, they had done quite well through the most recent lockdown, working online, but it is hard to escape the facts: out of the 195 school days between 23 March 2020 and 23 March 2021, one of these boys had been in school for 65 of them and the other just 62.
None of this is their fault of course. Lockdowns and last term’s disruption have affected all kids similarly. We went on to discuss what the last year had been like – for them and for us as a school – and it is easy to see how a year of crisis management takes its toll. We are now in the thirteenth month of a commanding style of leadership at all levels of society and in school. Independent decision making is eroded in times of crisis, with those in authority giving out commands which need to be followed; not the ideal way to run an organisation, a country or anything else, but it has been necessary to manage us out of a crisis.
Within our world in school, we can see the impact of these 13 months. We haven’t been working to our strategic plan but instead reacting to the virus, lockdowns, abandoned exams, testing and any number of other commands from the Government. The minds of our kids and our staff are full of rules and directives and less full of creativity, expressing themselves, developing skills. Unfortunately we still have a few more months of this to go.
However, it is only a few months. And increasingly there is a sense of optimism around the place that we are emerging from all this. Strategic plans are back out on the table; we have a medium-term plan for this year which sees us out of the crisis including: transparent and fair centre assessed grades for Years 11 and 13, a Covid recovery curriculum which will start the first day after Easter, a catch-up plan which will start around half term and continue for at least 15 months, an investment in Years 10 and 12 from June 21, and a big investment in those students who have struggled with the return to school. We are also planning a debate about what to keep from this period which will help our kids in the long term.
By September we’ll be ready to launch our next three-year plan (which is written and ready to go). As you can imagine, it focuses on teaching, learning and assessment through the use of cognitive science, behaviour, welfare and a much-expanded provision beyond the classroom. This last point is vital. We are determined that our students not only have the best experience in the classroom, but can access activities which are interesting, challenging and rival any school in the private sector in terms of range and emphasis.
Recently Mr Apostol wrote to all parents and carers asking if anyone wanted to offer their expertise to help broaden our extra-curricular offering. We’ve had some fantastic offers including: robot building, scuba diving, roller disco, archery and lots more. We’re in the process of planning how these will work and whilst we can’t guarantee they will all run next year, we will certainly try our best. If you have a skill you’d like to share with a group of students, it’s not too late, we’d still love to hear from you – please get in touch.
We’re looking forward to getting out of the cycle of crisis management and back to giving our staff the space to run their parts of our little empire here as they are so good at doing. There may be bumps along the way but it feels more sure than ever that we will soon be able to start running the school as we want to do.
Also, pubs re-open on 12 April; almost getting emotional now.
Best wishes
Andy Perry – Head Teacher
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