Welcome Back!
Dear Families,
I hope that you have had a wonderful Summer break! September is always an exciting time in school and we look forward to welcoming pupils back on Monday, 4th September. Breakfast Club provision will begin as normal (there is no need to re-register pupils).
There is lots of important information in this newsletter, so do please scroll through and make a note of anything relating to your child(ren).
Attendance
I write about attendance periodically simply because it really is so important. You may have noticed in the news that school attendances nationally are down significantly on pre-covid levels. As a school, we finished last year with an attendance of 91.94%. This figure might seem relatively positive, but this represented a huge amount of lost learning time. New academic years offer us the opportunity to start afresh and please can I ask that you support us as much as possible with this target.
Start of year challenge: Can we finish our first week with a school attendance of above 98%? If so, we will finish Week One with an extra special whole school Hot Chocolate Friday!
Uniform
Whilst uniform is not compulsory, we strongly encourage that all pupils wear school uniform daily. In recent years, some of our older pupils have started to move away from uniform. It is important that we return to setting a high standard in this area.
Click on this button to purchase different items of uniform.
Coffee Morning
I am going to hold another Headteacher's Coffee Morning on Monday, 11th September at 9:00.
This will offer an informal opportunity for parents/grandparents/carers or anyone connected to the school to come in and discuss any ideas that you might have, any concerns that you have or anything that you would like to draw to my attention.
Running a large and busy school, I am aware that there may be feelings or perceptions which I am unaware of but I am always willing to listen and consider ideas. I held the last meeting in January and I used the feedback which parents provided me to frame discussions at staff meetings.
Inset Days for 2023-2024
- Friday 1st September. Local Authority Directed Day.
- 27th November. Cluster Inset Day.
- 8th December. Focus on high quality teaching with an Estyn inspector.
- 26th January. Oracy and independence work.
- 8th April. Local Authority Directed Day.
- 19th July. Research informed schools.
So, what are we going to be working on this year?
At the end of each academic year, I spend time considering all of our school data and information. I then use this data to consider what we are doing well and what we need to work on. As ever, core standards in language and maths are a key priority so, even though we have made huge progress in these areas, they are still a focus. Considering all of our evaluation data, we have identified five areas to work on:
Target one: To raise standards further in teaching and learning. Focus on Pace, Questioning and Independence.
A huge amount of research tells us that the most important thing that we can do to support pupil progress is to ensure that we have excellent standards in teaching. During our inset day in December we are going to be working on this target.
Target two: To raise standards further in teaching and learning. Focus on Retrieval Practice.
Retrieval practice relates to introducing systems that support pupils to memrise key learning. We are going to introduce a number of important systems to support this.
Target three: To develop further the daily Welsh skills of all staff and learners (on going target), maintaining and building upon pupil use of daily Welsh across the school, embedding the new Welsh continuum.
Welsh Language skills are an ongoing target for the Welsh Government and we are going to continue to develop teaching and learning relating to Welsh.
Target four: To raise standards further in teaching and learning. Literacy.
- Literacy (Reading)
- Continue to raise standards in reading – everyone a reader by the end of Year 2. Embedding reciprocal reading strategies.
- Continue to develop BAME Reading Curriculum, including implementation of whole class sets.
- Continue to raise standards in reading across the curriculum.
- Literacy (Writing)
- Produce a detailed review of the quality of Talk for Writing across the school.
- Improve standards of writing across the curriculum.
- Ensure that we are applying new curriculum approaches to the teaching of writing.
Target five: To raise standards further in teaching and learning. Maths.
- Sustain standards in numeracy.
- Reasoning
- Introduce systems for measuring progress in reasoning.
- Improve opportunities to develop reasoning across the curriculum.
Target Six: (Pupil Voice Target) Continued focus on high levels of well-being across the school community.
- To develop further opportunities for non-competitive sport for all pupils.
- Become the first ‘Parkrun School’ in the country.