Headmaster's Message
Dear Parents
It was good to see so many of you at our recent parents’ consultation meetings on Wednesday evening. There was lots of in depth conversations on progress and next steps and hopefully plenty of satisfied parents at the end of the evening. The second phase of these is scheduled for next Thursday and I look forward to seeing the rest of you then.
We have been looking at ways to make these evenings more parent friendly as we plan ahead for next year. With the increase in numbers at the school it is increasingly difficult to accommodate all of the parents on any one evening. Wednesday’s session involved Reception to Year 4 and whilst we were able to keep to timings for the most part, there was inevitably a bit of slippage as we neared the end of the evening.
Many thanks to parents for their patience and understanding with this. With this in mind, we are planning to limit the number of year groups covered at each evening to three from next September. We are also looking at the option of running the consultations for Pre-Prep in the children’s classrooms. This will of course mean more late evenings for staff but crucially it will mean we can focus on the important business of sharing information and building the home-school partnership that so many academic studies will tell us is the key to success in education. There is more to do to iron out the finer details but I hope that going forward we can make these evenings calm and productive for all concerned.
I based my assembly earlier in the week on a similar theme, talking to the children about how to remain calm even when day to day frustrations threaten to get the better of us. I blew up a balloon as an analogy, inflating it more and more as little things went wrong during my imaginary day. The children came up with some lovely ideas about how to remain calm and in control, such as counting to 10, repeating a personal mantra, trying to empathise with the other person or asking a friend for help or advice. I have come across a few drivers on my route into school who would benefit from the children’s ideas, I must say.
On Thursday I was over at Princethorpe to hear a fascinating presentation from Ed Hester and his team on future plans for the College. I know a number of Crescent parents were there and were most impressed with what they heard. Each year for the last three years Princethorpe has been comfortably the most popular secondary school destination for our pupils and looking at the current campus and plans for future improvements, it is easy to see why. They have an open afternoon coming up on Sunday 24 March and you might want to go and have a look round if you haven’t done so already.
Best Wishes
Joe Thackway
