Dear Families,
I hope this update finds you and those closest to you in good health. I write to you with a very brief, mid-week, end of term update. Having said farewell to our students in school this week we will begin closing the site down for the Christmas period. You can feel that our community are looking forward to some rest and downtime with lots of our students wishing their peers and our staff a relaxing and enjoyable break as they left the site today.
Start of term arrangements
You can find the letter for families on our website here, with details of the staggered start to term and mass testing. Our Year 11 Engineering students have a slightly different arrangement and have been issued with a letter about their exam and revision session in January.
Student leadership
Our Student Leaders have raised a staggering £568.77 over the last week through festive activities including a Christmas Cupcake Sale and what appear to have become the legendary Candy Canes. They will allocate the funds raised to a local charity in January. This is another example of how capable our young people are when given a challenge, showing they can collaborate, communicate and organise large events through the student leadership structures we have in place.
Students have created and distributed Christmas Cards to residents of local care homes today too as part of our ‘One kind word’ theme. Some of the cards have been really impressive and we hope the wishes of goodwill bring a little joy to the recipients.
Our Tree of hope has also been created by our student leadership team and this is sat proudly in the learning hub alongside our Christmas tree at present. Students from across the school wrote messages of hope on leaves during anti-bullying week. These were then collated together by students leaders and assembled into the tree display this week. You can see an image of this in the web version of this update.
Final thoughts
Whilst the latter stages of this term have presented challenges for our community we have had such a productive and rewarding term overall. Writing these updates each week allows me to capture just snippets of the breadth of activities and the positivity that comes with being a member of our unique community. It is a pleasure and a privilege to be able to share them with you. As the Autumn term draws to a close and out community embark on their holidays, it is good to take stock and see what our young people, your children, have achieved over the last 4 months.
Christmas can be a time for reflection but more than anything it should be a time spent with those closest to you. I wish a Merry Christmas to all of our community who are celebrating and hope you all manage to spend some quality time with your families over the next fortnight.
Best wishes,
Scott Doyle
Principal
