Head's Lines: Inset Day A fantastic day of training for our teachers and administration, we look forward to the thought-provoking IB Art exhibition and the creative drama performance “Working Title”. Find out how we will be celebrating World Down Syndrome Day. And finally, a calendar update in response to feedback from our parents for next year.

A fantastic day of training for our teachers and administration, we look forward to the thought-provoking IB Art exhibition and the creative drama performance “Working Title”. Find out how we will be celebrating World Down Syndrome Day. And finally, a calendar update in response to feedback from our parents for next year.

A busy training day for our fantastic staff

Last Friday, every member of the academic and administrative staff at St Andrews attended training at the Primary and High School campuses. This training focused on new personal data protection guidelines and policies that will bring the school in line with the new law taking effect in Thailand later this year. Another significant discussion topic on Friday covered the moderation and evaluation of student work, and in particular, the importance of relying on similar criteria and expectations in assessing and marking work between year group classes, as well as between different year groups.

At the High School, important preparations and pre-assessments took place as part of the International Baccalaureate Organisation’s standard five-year review of our IB Diploma Programme to ensure we are delivering this curriculum at the highest standards of teaching and learning. This review focuses on each part of the IB Diploma programme, including the schemes of work and teaching practices across the Senior Studies Programme. All IB schools are required to complete this regular review and meet all the expectations in order to be authorised by the IBO for another five years.

Friday’s training day was also a great opportunity for opening our discussions on ‘Equality, Inclusion and Diversity’. Once again, all staff from every part of the school participated and contributed in this session, and the goal was to obtain a clear view of where we are as a community, and how we can work with the rest of the NAE organisation to meet the standards we want our communities across the world to follow. To be truly impactful in this regard will also require the active involvement of our students and members of the parent community.

IB Arts - Final Exhibition

This coming week we will be celebrating our Year 13 Senior Arts students who will present their final exhibition entitled IMM/UNITY.  As in previous years, this thought-provoking exhibition features arts students presenting their work on a particular theme and explaining their interpretation to IB examiners via a video recording. Following this, when the exhibitions are open to our whole school community, we can all enjoy the work they have created.

Working Title

On Thursday, our drama students from across the High School will present their creations called “Working Title”. This brings together lots of recent work from across the school and gives our school community the opportunity to once again enjoy the excellent IB Theatre Arts and GCSE work that students produced as part of their courses’ final examinations.

World Down Syndrome Day

World Down Syndrome Day will take place on Sunday 21st March this year, so we will celebrating this day on Friday 19th March by wearing mismatched socks as part of the #LotsOfSocks campaign! Within our STA community we have caring and delightful students in our STARS, ED and MS programmes who go about their day with such positive attitudes, and they happen to have Down syndrome. So on this day STA we will celebrate and recognize our Down syndrome students and the wider community by 'rocking' our crazy socks and embracing this day as a community.

Calendar updates for both this year and next

By now, I hope you have seen the updated calendar for this academic year which designates Tuesday, 6th April a school holiday, while making Wednesday 26th May (Visakha Bucha Day) a normal school day.

In response to comments from parents and staff, there will also be a change to next year’s academic calendar. I know everyone follows the global pandemic news closely, and we all hope that the vaccine roll out across the world will bring this crisis to an end. However, travel restrictions are still in place, making it more difficult for people to easily travel to their home countries. Added to this, the mandatory quarantine when people come back to Thailand makes planning home trips for non-Thai families even more difficult and expensive. With the vaccination programme in Thailand not yet underway, we know that many people are considering whether it is viable to return to their home country during the long vacation.

By reorganising several single day holidays on the calendar, we have been able to put together a four week holiday at the end of Term 1 which would give families a longer opportunity to return to their home country and reunite with their families this year. Hopefully by December the global vaccination programme will be much further on and travel restrictions will be eased. The movement of the single days ensures such that no teaching time would be lost.

Next week we will publish a revised Academic Calendar 2021-22 which plans for Term 1 to finish on Friday 10th December 2021 and start back for Term 2 on Monday 10th January 2022. The link to this revised calendar will also be included in next week’s newsletter.

For parents with enquiries, please contact support@standrews.ac.th. Or call the Primary School at +66 2 381-2387-8 or the High School at +66 2 056-9555.