Dear Parents and Carers
NOTICE OF A CHANGE TO THE SCHOOL CALENDAR
The Governing Body have agreed to a proposal to bring forward the date of the next INSET Day from Friday 3 July 2020 to Monday 6 January 2020.
This will mean that all students will now return to school after the Christmas Break on Tuesday 7 January 2020, at the normal time. Friday 3 July 2020 will now, therefore, be a normal school day.
The reason for this change is that we wish to capitalise on a number of exciting curriculum developments that will benefit all students – but will enhance the outcomes of Years 11 and 13 students in particular. On reflection, July will be too late to use the time to benefit our oldest students and therefore we wish to press on with those improvements right away and enable teaching staff to accelerate the development of our curriculum.
We have offered training in a number of specialist areas this term, most recently focussing on modelling the outcomes we would like our students to achieve. All teachers have been encouraged to show students what secure and excellent outcomes look like in their subjects. For example, in our literacy family of subjects, this will mean the writing of grade 5 and grade 9 paragraphs. These will ensure that all students have complete clarity regarding what constitutes excellence.
It’s exciting stuff but it takes a huge amount of time to translate great theory into day-to-day practice and sometimes this can only be done when colleagues can get together and work collaboratively for extended periods. This is something that is hard to find with school life being so busy; bringing forward our INSET day will allow us to accelerate these exciting improvements to lessons.
We recognise that this change will cause some disruption and reorganisation for families and apologise for this relatively late change to our term dates. Should this present nsurmountable problems then we ask that you make contact with the relevant Head of Year to discuss further.
Yours sincerely
Barry Doherty, Headteacher
