Letter from the Head of Primary - 14th April 2016

14 April 2016

We are fully in the throes of the summer term with coffee mornings, class assemblies and CCAs all beginning again this week. It was great to see so many of our parents join our two coffee mornings yesterday. The focus was very much on providing parents with an overview of everything that would happen this term, not only with regards to events taking place, but also preparations underway for the forthcoming academic year. Whilst we still have a considerable amount of teaching and learning to complete in our respective year groups and classes, we are also planning for the year ahead and gathering information together which will help students, staff and parents to start a new academic year smoothly.

In our coffee mornings, we discussed our plans for transition for all of the year groups who will be moving to a new Key Stage next year – Reception, Year 2 and Year 6. We will be hosting specific coffee mornings next month to address our transition programme in detail. We also discussed the end of KS1 and KS2 tests that will take place and the format these will take. Again, we will provide more information to parents of Year 2 and Year 6 students in due course. Our coffee mornings are always a good time to get feedback from our parents on what is working well in the school and how we can further improve aspects of school life and, as a result, we have made a number of tweaks or changes this year based on parental feedback from these events. We are therefore really keen to continue our coffee mornings next academic year to ensure we maintain frequent face-to-face contact and communication with our parents.

This week we have also launched our Junior production, ‘Horrible Histories’. All classes in Year 3, Year 4, Year 5 and Year 6 will be participating in, what is sure to be, a quirky and comedic representation of important periods of history, all of which are focused around the topics the students have been studying during their topics throughout this year. An overview of the production has today been emailed to all Junior parents and we will continue to update specific classes and year groups as rehearsals take place.

Our class assemblies also resumed today and 6A have set the bar extremely high for our remaining assemblies with an excellent presentation on what career paths the students would like to embark upon in the future. The Year 6 students reflected on their recent visit to the Careers and University Fair that was held at school and had clearly put a lot of thought into what they wanted to do in the future, whilst also thinking about how they needed to achieve their goal. It was fantastic to hear our students talk so eloquently and thoughtfully about their prospective careers.

Next week, our booking system for our final Primary Academic Review Evenings will open, so we hope to see many of our parents on Monday 25^th and Wednesday 27^th April.

Lisa Passante

Head of Primary