Parents' Information Evening 2013

For those who were unable to attend the Parental Information Evening, I promised to prepare a brief summary of everything we covered, so here goes!

It seems almost unnecessary to do so, but I do believe that it is important to always come back to the founding vision for Sandymoor School, because it is one of the things that makes us different. Everyone is reminded of this vision and everything we do is measured against it, giving us all a strong sense of focus for what we are creating here. So:

“Sandymoor School aims to be an 11-18 school, creating intelligent, employable global citizens that demonstrate social competence, a desire for learning and respect for each other and the world around us.”

And this leads us into thinking about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of what we are doing, every day, in school. For about the past 15 years, a local lad, Sir Ken Robinson, has been involved in the global educational scene, pushing for schools to change their approach to education, and his thinking is very much in line with Sandymoor’s vision. The link below is a short (10 minute) animated version of one of his key talks:

Ken Robinson’s talk on the changing nature of education: http://bit.ly/1620eNA

At Sandymoor, we are also focussed on the ‘soft skills’; not to the exclusion of knowledge and the importance of developing a rigorous, broad base of understanding across a wide range of subjects, but as well as. The CBI has published reports showing that school leavers do not have these soft skills they require in the modern workplace and it is Sandymoor’s goal to ensure that our students do leave with them. To that aim, we work with a model first developed by Professor Guy Claxton:

 

The attitude and mind-set that Sir Ken Robinson advocates, along with the structured approach to helping young people develop better thinking skills, form the basis for our curriculum structure. However, there are a few more down to earth elements that also support the development of all our students:

Work Habits:

Sandymoor students are expected to be fully prepared to work, and have all the equipment they need to perform their job. We do not want students to think that being prepared for lessons is acceptable. We also expect them to have pride in what they are creating and this shows through the presentation of their work – if we feel that a student could make a piece of work look better and that they have rushed it, just to get it done quickly, then they will be asked to do it again.

We do have a policy where it is perfectly ok (in fact expected) to not know everything – that is, after all, why they are in school! We encourage all students to ask when they do not understand. If it is not possible to ask immediately, they are more than welcome to seek out their teacher after the lesson and seek support, or email them through the school’s systems. No child at Sandymoor will be made to feel stupid because they asked a question.

Being a Community:

We expect all our students to get on and respect the differences in others. There are ‘fall-outs’ and sometimes students act in thoughtless and hurtful ways. When this occurs, we have a completely zero tolerance policy and every instance where one of our students is made to feel small, hurt or unliked is dealt with seriously. We are also likely to deal with any student who stands by and lets another student be hurt.

We believe that everyone deserves respect and so when we do follow up poor behaviour, it is always done behind ‘closed doors’. No student it told off in front of their peers as this is a humiliating action. We have a policy, therefore of: Praise in Public – Reprimand in Private (PIP-RIP). You may have a conversation at home with your son or daughter about something they saw happen in school and ask “What did the Teacher do about it?” – the reply will be “Nothing.”, but that does not mean that nothing has happened. Quite the opposite.  

Uniform:

The Sandymoor uniform is designed to be as simple, neat and effective as possible, and be as affordable for all as possible. Given that, we expect all our students to look neat and smart in their uniform; we believe that how you present yourself says a lot about what you value and we expect our students to value themselves. Ties should be done up properly and a reasonable length (we do not use clip-on ties as this is demeaning). Shirts should be white fit well, with the top button done up. Jumpers, blazers, trousers & skirts should be in good order and clean. Skirts, particularly, should be of a modest length, with the bottom of the skirt line around knee-length as a guide. Shoes should be supportive, comfortable and black, with no bright markings. There are times when, for various reasons, a student has to deviate from this and providing a conversation has been had about the reasons why, a temporary compromise is usually possible.

All students carry with them a ‘Conduct Card’, showing penalty points issued for not wearing their uniform correctly or acting in an inappropriate way during the school day. They also carry a ‘Star Card’ for collecting points for acting above and beyond.

We are changing our uniform requirements in respect to the PE kit, but no parent of existing students will have to pay to purchase our new PE uniform.

Make-up:

We recognise that for some students, not being able to wear a small amount of discrete make-up can cause distress. So, rather than having a total ban on make-up, we allow girls to wear certain elements. The guidelines are explained to them clearly and are based around helping them feel confident whilst maintaining a professional, work-place demeanour. The same applies to nail varnish, which, if warn, must be a single, subtle, colour and cover the whole nail without chips or flakes.

Mobile Phones:

We also allow students to carry around with them their mobile phones. They are not allowed to use them or have them out in lessons (unless the teacher has asked them to – some mobile phones have very good calculators, cameras, stop-watches, etc… on them!) and they should be off or on mute (just as if they were working in an office). If they are going to contact home during the day, we ask that they let a member of staff know before-hand, just so we are aware.

Term dates / Attendance / Punctuality:

The term dates have been distributed to homes and we ask parents to be aware of these when planning family events. Particular note should be made of the two-week half term in October, providing an extra opportunity for family holidays, etc.

If your son or daughter is too unwell to come into school, please ring or email the school to let us know. We have a policy of ‘First Day Call’ and will ring through our emergency contact list for you by mid-morning to see where your child is if we have not heard from you. When they return to school, please could you also include a signed note confirming the reason why they were off.

For planned absences, such as medical appointments, please let us know, in writing, before-hand. There are notes in the back of the planner to help with this.

There has been a change in the law this academic year regarding the taking children out of school during term time. In simple terms, this is at the discretion of the head teacher to allow, but will only be granted in truly exceptional circumstances. If there may be such a reason, it is important that you book an appointment to see Mr Green-Howard to discuss it as soon as possible.  Failure to do so may now result in a penalty notice fine of £60 (£120 if not paid within 28 days) issued by the head teacher.

We also expect all students to be at their lessons on time, ready to begin promptly. There are no school bells deliberately, as we want everyone to take responsibility for their own actions.

Clubs & Societies:

These occur after 3:45pm and finish off the school day. Students can (& have) opted into these, and can chose to come home early on a night where there are no clubs running that they are involved in. However, once signed up to a club, they are expected to then participate in that club for a minimum length of time. Registers will be taken and a student missing from a club will be treated with as seriously as if they had missed a lesson, including a detention. Clubs run Mondays to Thursdays.

ICT / Internet:

We would ask that all parents sign up to ParentMail as this is our main route for communication. If you register your mobile phone number, then you will receive urgent school messages (such as snow closure notices). Signing up with an email address as well and you will also receive electronic copies of everything that is sent home with the students. ParentMail is also our ‘online school shop’, where you will be able to top up their lunch money (& see what they have bought for lunch), purchase extra items of uniform, replace lost equipment and, where appropriate, pay for music lessons and/or school trips. If you would like support with setting this up, please contact school and arrange to meet with Mr Fry, our IT/Network Manager, to sort this out.

Shortly, we will also be sending out details of another website for parents – My Child At School (MCAS). MCAS is your portal into the school ‘report’; through MCAS, you will see a summary of your child’s attendance data as well as their behaviour record (both positive and negative). Also, after October ½ term, you will see the progress measurements for all their academic subjects, including end of year targets. As they are created, PDF versions of the school report (Individual Development Plan, IDP), will also be available via MCAS.

Alongside this, your child has access to the school’s Learning Environment, based on the Microsoft Office 365 suite. Through this, they have an email account, and access to online versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint to enable them to create school work without the expense of the home needing to buy the software. This is a very powerful suite of tools and over time, every subject area will have all their lesson material on this site, for access outside of school hours.

Parental Involvement:

As we have said before, we are here for the whole family, not just the child, and extend a warm hand to all parents. We are here if you need our support over anything; just ask and everything will be treated in confidence.

Also, we are always very keen for parental support! In the first instance, we would love all parents to join our PTA and get involved that way. If you are interested, please email them at SSCF@sandymoorschool.org.uk

Also, please come along and support us at our two open events, Wednesday, 18^th September at 5:30pm and Saturday, 28^th September at 10:30am.

Finally, we will be sending out invites in the near future to our first formal evening Founders Day Celebration evening. Please keep the evening of the 8^th November clear to join us in celebrating the students’ successes over the last year. We have as a guest speaker the Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire, David Briggs. It should be a hugely enjoyable evening.  

First assembly, September 2013

Welcome back! I hope everyone has had a great summer break and is refreshed and ready to work hard…

 

I know when Autumn is approaching - the supermarkets all start to try to sell off their barbeque stuff & the X-factor starts on the tellie! For me Autumn is probably my favourite season & for lots of reasons.

 

First of all, there's the autumn colours - we have good weather in September & early October (which usually do), the bright, crisp mornings, with the leaves turning colour are really uplifting. The days are still long enough to enjoy daylight before the nights close in and the animals & birds are all looking to prepare themselves for winter.

 

And I have been in teaching long enough now to feel that Autumn is sort of a 'new year' beginning as much as January is!

 

So for me, Autumn is a time of reflection, of the year passed, and a time to think about the year to come. Sort of a new beginning.

 

And there are lots of new things! (& not just my new beard).. The new building, with all the new space. New pupils, already looking and feeling like they're part of the woodwork. New staff, both teachers and non-teachers. You will all, by now, have met the new teachers; Mrs Berry and Mr Lydiate, teaching STEM (Science, Technology & Maths) & Mr Evans, teaching our PE & enhancing our sporting provision. But we also have Ms. Edwards, working with Mr Timms as our Catering Assistant and Miss Parker & Dr. Faulke, working in the Admin team, to help everything run smoothly!

 

We also have a number of new routines and practices; the new minibus pick-up route (driven by Mrs Dockerty) - I'm wondering how many of you will want to sign up for that once the weather closes in … And the Breakfast club. I am afraid that, as the numbers have gone up, we have had to stop you coming onto school grounds before 8:35am - it's one of those 'Health & Safety' things. The staff come into school early so that they can be prepared and ready to give you the very best that you deserve; they cannot be supervising pupils on site as well. That is why we have introduced the breakfast club, with Mr Timms supervising people signed up for it until 8:30.

 

But a lot of what we are doing is the same. We still want the very best for each and every one of you. We will hold you to account for your actions, challenging you to think about what you are doing and the impact it might have on other people. We will expect nothing but your best, because we expect nothing but the best from ourselves.

 

There are about 7 billion people in the world today, with over 200,000 new babies born every day. (and about 100,000 people dying every day). And even so, each and every one of those people, including every newborn child, is unique and special.

 

And that includes you, because you are so very special. Every one of you has a unique set of talents and gifts that no-one else on the earth has, ever has or ever will have! There has never been anyone like you before and there never will be. You have a duty to be the very, very best you can be, because there will never be anyone else with your talents. Who knows - you could well be the one person on the entire earth who has the ability to solve cancer, say, or maybe invent the next amazing piece of technology that will change peoples lives forever, or persuade waring countries to live at peace with each other. And here you sit. All that potential, waiting to develop.

 

The writer, Marianne Williamson wrote a quote that is often quoted;

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

It is often reported that Nelson Mandela quoted this in a speech shortly after being released from prison & that is how I first came across it - Nelson Mandela, now aged 95, was born into a world in a country where his life was limited and restricted merely because of the colour of his skin. He fought the injustice of that to the point where he was imprisoned for life. 27 years later, he was released, after intense pressure from international organisations and, as we hopefully know, went on to become South Africa's first ever black president.

And as I mentioned last week, when we welcomed Foundation 1 in for their Flying Start days, we also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the famous Martin Luther King speech. Born an ordinary kid, in America at a time when blacks had to sit in a different part of the bus, drink from different water fountains and were not allowed to attend schools where white kids went. As he grew up, like Nelson Mandela, he protested about the inequality all around him. This culminated in his famous 'I have a dream' speech:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'we hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal'.

For daring to stand up and be counted, for daring to challenge people to think about things differently, for daring to not put up with anything less than the best, he was shot and killed. But he did it anyway, knowing the risks.

And that makes all the difference. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Sandymoor School. You. All of us need to ensure that we do not put up with second best. All of us hold inside us a wealth of talent and passion and we must not be afraid to let that show. As the Marianne Williamson quote says, we should not ask "who am I to be brilliant?", but instead, we should have the courage to say "Who am I not to be brilliant?"!

Schools at the heart of the Community

What does it, in fact, mean for a school to have the word 'community' in it's title? Does it make it a different, special type of school in any way, or are all schools, to greater or lesser extent, community schools? It is my belief that they are (or at least should be).

To start with, schools are, in their own right, communities. Courtesy of a certain online encyclopaedia, we can look at the definition of community as:

The term community has two distinct commutative meanings: 1) Community can refer to a usually small, social unit of any size that shares common values. The term can also refer to the national community or international community, and 2) in biology, a community is a group of interacting living organisms sharing a populated environment.

And whichever definition you take, a school is a community! A school needs a set of common values that it holds close and tries to instil into new members, for example. But/and it is a community of living organisms sharing an environment.

But it should be so much more than that too. A community shouldn't 'just' be a group of people who share a living environment. There's an implication that the members of the community care about and support each other, too. And that is what 'good' communities do. There is a recognition that the community is made up from people from a wide range of backgrounds, and holding many disparate views and opinions, but despite that (or even because of that) they look out for each other.

At Sandymoor, we have asked all our current students to be mentors for the new intake. Each new student joining us in September has a named student who will lo out for them on arrival and help them settle in. Our mentors have already written introductory letters that have been posted to our new arrivals (a good use of time in English lessons, with the construction of a good letter, handwriting, grammar and spelling, etc...!)

Who, though, are the members of a school community? Teachers/support staff and students, of course, but also parents and the wider family unit too, surely? Schools talk a good talk over the 'home-school' relationship, but this can often be little more than talk. (To paraphrase Sir Ken Robinson, what school wouldn't talk about home-school communication!). But this is too frequently a relationship that is one-sided. The school sits there and says to the home; "we want you to be part of your child's education, but on our terms, please." The parents always have to go to the school, at times dictated to by the school, to find out about their child's progress.

At Sandymoor, we offer home visits, at times to suit busy family lives. We are currently in the process of visiting homes that have requested this service and whilst being incredibly tiring, I can say that it is proving to be so worthwhile (again, having done it last year too). To sit in a family's home and talk about their hopes and dreams for their child is a truly humbling experience, reminding me again and again why I am so passionate about teaching. And I sometimes hear things that will help us support a young person who has a more difficult path ahead. Foresight can truly help us put in the support that young person needs, before they need it.

And moving on, we offer a range of dates and times for school-home parental consultations, rather than the one evening in the school diary and 'tough luck' if you can't come in to school in that date.

But community is also so much more than that too. The school needs to remember the people who live in the streets and closes around the physical building. These homes will, as likely as not, be homes to people who don't have children of secondary school age (as part of my learning journey, I now know that, on average, one house in seven across the country has children of secondary school age!). A school has a duty to be their for these people too. A school should be a beating heart to a community, living and breathing, providing something for everyone.

In three weeks time, the annual Sandymoor Summer Fair is being held on the green just over the street from our current temporary buildings. We are all going to be there, with all our staff, current and future, and the school will be open and actively being part of the celebration of community that the Summer Fair is. We are inviting the families of all our students, current and future, to join us in celebrating the community that is Sandymoor at this event; the strongest communities are those that look outwards and invite people in.

But looking ahead, we have been passionate about ensuring that the design for the new building has community access and use built into the very heart of the plans. We have designed a dedicated community entrance to the school, with a community office and corridor, allowing for evening and weekend access to parts of the building that will be of benefit to the community. And these facilities? A full, Sport England standard sports hall, with scope for our badminton courts / indoor football / basketball / trampolining ... ... Etc. A separate dance studio, with a sprung wooden floor and double height ceiling (with picture windows looking East over Keckwick Brook). Music rooms, including recording studio, to extend our involvement with providing music lessons to the local area. And that's not mentioning the conference / meeting room facilities we have built into the school, offering local businesses the potential to use state of the art IT facilities and conference spaces to support their growth, a video-conferencing room providing the ability for international communication from the comfort of Runcorn, and flexible spaces waiting for the community to see the potential of!

Schools have a moral duty to be active participants in the community they are part of, to be cement building community and making it stronger, and looking always outwards, not being insular (no 'nimbys' welcome), looking to see the benefits of working together for the benefit of all.

That is certainly what I want Sandymoor School to be know as.

 

School Trips - an excuse for a 'jolly', or a real educational experience?

Ok, so a long title and a relatively short post. But there is a genuine debate here. I'm writing this post from Spain, with 22 students aged between 11 & 14. We are spending the week in Calella & Barcelona, visiting various Gaudi installations as well as touring old Barcelona and experiencing the culture of this area of Spain.

Are we right to be here, during term time? And should I use some of the school's Pupil Premium money to ensure that some students who could never afford to travel abroad can experience this?

I'm my mind, the answer is, to quote the BGT judges, 100% yes. Our students are about as diverse as it is possible to be, with a number who have not travelled beyond the borders of the UK (in fact, we have a couple of students who have never left the North West).

They have coped with navigating the bureaucracy of international flight, passport control and security screening. They have seen the inside of the flight deck (courtesy of one of our Business Mentors, who re-arranged her shifts to pilot our plane) & landed in a foreign country late in the evening.

They have risen to the challenges and more, growing in confidence as they realise that they have the capacity to cope with this 'strange' country and they have surprised themselves with their determination to practice their burgeoning language skills.

Whilst in school, they have, occasionally, broken into factions and squabbled over perceived differences, but here they learn that they share so much more in common than their differences may suggest and they work to support each other in many touching ways.

They are bigger, and better, in so many ways because of this opportunity and so yes, it is a wonderful, concentrated learning experience.

As for a 'jolly' ... So far the teachers have been on duty until midnight last night, up on duty from 7am this morning and we'll be able to switch off tonight, probably, around 10pm. And we'll repeat this pattern until we land back in the UK Friday afternoon. It is certainly not an easy option, however pleasant the students. My teachers take their responsibility towards students very seriously - it is one of the things I am so proud of about them, and they are even more careful and attentive out here, where we are truly in loco parentis.