Weekly Bulletin Week Commencing 11 November 2024

Events coming up

20th KS4 Prepare to Perform Evening

20th Musical Theatre Evening Performance

27th Year 11 Presentation Evening (2024 leavers)

28th Year 10 BTEC Child Development trip (as per letter)

29th Lille Christmas Market trip

Saturday 30 November – Christmas themed Craft Fayre

Donations of unwanted gifts, alcohol, chocolates and anything nice are needed for the tombola and would be very much appreciated.

Message from the Leadership Team

Dear Noadswood families,

We hope that you are all well this chilly Friday. As you’ll read below, we’ve had another week filled with hard work and commitment from so many people. We are so proud of our students and staff and particularly the leadership shown by our students! Yesterday, the Head Students provided me with incredible feedback from their meeting with our Catering Company and from their work with our Year 7 tutor groups via their buddy system. Important progress made and actions to take. They are true leaders supported by the Senior Prefects, the Prefects and all the Student Voice reps.

We are pleased to welcome lots of key stage four families to our ‘Prepare to Perform’ evening next Wednesday. All resources will be made available to all families after the event, if you have any specific questions relating to this, please do email Mrs Rollett, Assistant Headteacher- erollett@noadswood.hants.sch.uk.

‘Prepare to Perform’ is a concept close to our hearts this year – we believe that a more conscious focus on this will take our steadily good outcomes to great in the interests of our marvellous students. More to follow through the year.

We’d like to thank all our parents and carers for their commitment and ‘stickability’ at the Y11 subject evening this week – we really do apologise again for the technical issues we had to overcome and I’m thankful to our IT team, as always, for a speedy diagnosis of what was going wrong.

Any questions or outstanding issues from that event, please let Mrs Way, Y11 Year Leader know.

We often talk proudly about the achievements of our curriculum areas and this week we’d like to spotlight our superb Art department. GCSE artists had a brilliant trip to London, and we’d like to thank the team for organising this vital enrichment and to our students who were a credit to us.

Finally for this week, it was great to present money raised in recent fundraisers to local charities that do so much for the local community: Oakhaven Hospice and the Air Ambulance Service. We were joined by representatives of both to chat to us, as well as some of the students who joined their grandparents at our recent event for them in our genuinely lovely library.

When I met the grandparents – after their competitively fought round of bingo – it meant so much to them to be in their grandchildren’s school. Family life takes effort and care and resilience, same for us as for anyone else, so it was lovely to play a small part in sustaining that in a new way. More to come!

As ever if you need to contact us, please use class charts or the email addresses on our contact page.

We benefit from all that is shared with us.

And, in turn, if you’d like to benefit from one of the vouchers for food or uniform, the link is here:

Best wishes,

Kathryn Marshall and the Noadswood Leadership Team

Kindness Week at Noadswood

We’ve run the Noadswood Kindness Weeks for years now and we’re super excited to have launched now the 2024 Kindness Week.

We’ve lots of activities happening within school, with our big focus for this year being ‘Spreading Kindness in our Local Community’.

We’re asking each tutor group to create a ‘Kindness Hamper’ which will then be distributed to our local foodbank, residential care homes and day centres throughout the month of December.

We’re asking for voluntary donations of toiletries and dried/cupboard food items.

Any donations should be handed in during tutor time. We will keep you updated on our progress.

Anti-Bullying week ‘Choose Respect’

Combining with our messages around Kindness, we’ve also been discussing the 2024 theme for Anti Bullying week – choose respect. We’ve been thinking about what it means to show respect to ourselves, our peers and the wider Noadswood family.

We’ve been reviewing our own Anti-Bullying policy, working with staff and students together, and Mrs Loveday will be alerting all parents/carers when this is uploaded and available via our website. All feedback welcome.

Student Voice

Written by the Students:

On the agenda this week we talked about the following:

• Guest speaker Tony Lane who is the area manager for Caterlink came to speak to all the students regarding their service to the school and listened to a presentation made by DM and GT. A survey will be sent to all students next week that needs to be completed by 30 November. Tony will then come back to our meeting in December with the results. We will also be holding a hands up survey next week to see how many students use the canteen and how many bring in packed lunches. Tony was able to send through an up-to-date version of the current menus which have now been added to the website, and begin to respond to some of our other suggestions.

• World Recycling Day will be on Tuesday 18th March 2025. More information as to how we can get involved and do our bit will be published in early 2025.

• Miss Skinner came in to talk about our current House system, its successes and how we can embed in all aspects of school life even more deeply. She would like to introduce more interhouse style competitions that are running throughout the year. Any feedback as to how you think we as a school could do this should be fed back to your child’s student voice rep in their tutor group.

We also went over previous minutes to see how we are doing:

• Coffee and Cake morning – This was a huge success with over 50 grandparents attending and donating so generously to both Oakhaven Hospice and Air Ambulance. It was a fun filled atmosphere with a good game of bingo. Further events like this will be organised throughout the year…

• World Mental Health Day – The Head Student team did a fantastic job of taking over assemblies for the week and talking to all students about this subject. This is a subject we will re-visit from time to time and update what they have started for future assemblies.

• Active Travel Ambassador Programme – Year 8 students are getting stuck into this programme and will hopefully be able to present to the student voice team in the coming months.

Remembrance Day

Military students across all years, along with Miss Beales and Mrs Marshall, came together to have their own 2 minute silence for Remembrance Day, and to lay our poppy wreath. Emily w, Roselyn R, and Eli H read a verse each of In Flanders Fields.

Marchwood Transport

Thank you to all families who reached out over their concerns regarding the Marchwood bus service. Mrs Rollett met with Councillor Richard Young from the New Forest District Council to outline concerns raised by families this week. We would like to thank Mr Young for his proactive approach, we felt assured that he understood the concerns raised by our families and we discussed steps that we could take to address these. We will continue to keep you updated on our progress with this.

A ‘heads up’ to Final Day Timings and Reward Assemblies (Friday 20th December 2024)

8:45 - 9:00 Tutor Time

9:00 - 9:45 Lesson 1

9:45 - 10:30 Lesson 2

10:30 - 10:45 Break

10:45 - 10:50 Return to Tutor Rooms for tutor-based activity (Individual tutors will confirm with their tutees)

Assembly Order

10:50 - 11:10 Year 7 Assembly

11:10 - 11:30 Year 8 Assembly

11:30 - 11:50 Year 9 Assembly

11:50 - 12:10 Year 10 Assembly

12:10 - 12:30 Year 11 Assembly

A bell will ring at the end of the year 11 assembly with all students leaving site at 12.30 pm. Please note that whilst we endeavour to stick to the timings of the day, there can be a small amount of flexibility in our end of term departure if assemblies have over run and with so much to celebrate, they can sometimes do this. Those students in receipt of Free School Meals (FSM) must get their food at break time as the canteen will not be open at lunchtime.