Headmaster's Message
Dear Parents
We had the pleasure in the week of a visit from the Reverend Tim from St Mark's Church. He spoke to the children about the need to protect our environment and in particular the powerful campaign that has recently been mounted by Greta Thunberg. The children listened carefully to the message and how dependent we are on sustainable agricultural productivity. A pertinent message as we head towards our harvest celebrations and the food bank collection gets underway.
I was also was pleased to announce to the children the arrival in school of class sets of purple pens. These will be used in the classrooms by the children for reviewing and correcting their own work. As part of our whole school improvement target this year we are looking at the area of feedback and marking. The ultimate aim is to improve pupil attainment through self-regulation, where they are able to review and edit their own work checking for accurate spelling and punctuation, as well as re-reading for meaning and coherence. On my learning walk this morning I was delighted to see lots of children making use of the pens and taking responsibility for their own work. Teachers are also providing children with target areas for them to assess themselves against. These are shared with the children and provide clear success criteria, enabling the children to monitor and improve their progress.
You will have received this week a letter regarding next week’s parents’ evenings. We have reviewed our practise in this area and hopefully you will find the new format more focused on your needs at this time of the year, and also the evenings will be considerably quieter. We are putting on four evenings in total this term, as opposed to the normal two, and whilst this results in greater staff commitment I believe it will be a better experience for parents. We will of course continue to monitor this as we go forward.
With some chillier autumn weather around this week we have certainly started to notice the change of seasons. This puts us in the mood for our harvest service, which is now under two weeks away.
Have a good weekend everyone.