St John Vianney School

Contents

• Headteacher's Message
• Key information and Dates for your Diary
• Lunches
• Stars of the Week
• Highlights of the Week
• Growing in Faith Through God's Stories
• Our Catholic School
• Poetry Corner
• Useful Information
• Links to Our Website and Social Media

Headteacher's Message

Dear Parents and Carers,   I do hope you and your families are well?   We have had a very busy first week back in school. The children and young people have however, returned well to school after the holidays and quickly settled back into their routines.   On Monday we received notification of our Catholic School Inspection, which took place on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. We welcomed into School two Diocesan Inspectors who were looking at our Catholic Life and Mission, our RE lessons and activities and our Collective Worship practices. The Inspectors told me they were made to feel really welcome in school and loved speaking with our pupils and staff, who were very honest and helpful in their conversations around our catholicity provision. The pupils certainly enjoyed the opportunity to share their talents and thoughts on school with the Inspectors.   We have received some really positive feedback on each area of the Inspection and the Inspectors will now write a report and give us gradings on our provision that we will share with you at the earliest opportunity. The report will need to go through a quality assurance process, which may take a few weeks. Thank you to the parents who completed the Inspection survey and the lovely comments they made about our Catholicity practice in school.   We now have 7 weeks left of this final half term and have a lot of work to do to ensure we are ready to close off this year and be ready for the new academic year in September. We have lots of events and activities planned for pupils to be involved in during the final part of the summer term, which we know the CYP will engage with and enjoy.   Best wishes, Mr A Moloney, Headteacher

Key information and Dates for your Diary

Dates for Your Diary

• Fri 26th June - All Day - INSET Day school closed for pupils
• Thu 20th Aug - GCSE results day

Key Info

Allergies

Please be aware that we have a number of pupils in school with severe nut allergies. To reduce the risk of exposure for these young people, we aim to keep the school nut free. In order to support us with this we kindly ask that you:

• Do not give children nuts or nut products in their packed lunches.
• Do not give nuts, nut products or snacks/bars containing nuts for break time snacks.
• Do not send cakes or food items, containing nuts, in to school for birthday celebrations, cake sales or events.

Thank you for your support.

Lunches

Week commencing Monday 8th June 2026:

Stars of the Week

• Class 1 Mrs Jordan - Nicholas - For making a great effort in class to answer questions and support his peers in their learning!
• Class 2 Miss Walsh - Abbie - Mae - For improved reading skills.
• Class 3 Mr Healey - Quinn - For being a good friend to others.
• Class 4 Mrs Garfin - Victoria - For always doing her best and excellent contribution in lessons.
• Class 5 Mr Whelan - Maisy - For being a positive role model for her peers.
• Class 6 Miss Shaw - Khalil - For more positive interactions with his peers in class.
• Class 7 Miss Graham - Matilda - For being brilliant and always trying her best.
• Class 8 Mrs Wood - Rhys - For consistently showing a positive attitude towards his GCSE exams, maintained positivity throughout the week and demonstrated strong listening skills.
• Class 9 Mr Donovan - Cormac - For his great sense of humour and good work.
• Class 10 Mr Wood - Charlie - For great work in his exams.
• Class 11 Miss Sherwin - Reece - For showing maturity and independence during his college transitions!
• Class 12 Ms Lord - Harley - For trying hard with his work and showing kindness to others.
• Class 13 Mr Kanakides - Charlie - For all his great work in the Live Simply day and in P16.
• Class 14 Miss Wilkinson - Tomasz - For being a great asset to SJV and being very helpful in the school kitchen.

Employee of the Week

Congratulations to Ms Yar!

Highlights of the Week

Growing in Faith Through God's Stories

On February 11th 2026, the School (led by Mrs Murphy) took part in a Catholicity 'Deep Learning Day'. Classes learned about Old Testament Stories and then designed and made mosaics of the stories they had heard. Below you can see the fantastic designs made by our children and young people which are proudly displayed in school.

Our Catholic School

Our spiritual focus at SJV this week comes from the words of Jesus. This message continues to guide us as we encourage our students to show kindness, compassion and respect to everyone in our school community:

"If you love me, keep my commandments. A new commandment I give you: love one another as I have loved you.”

As a Catholic school community, we were delighted to welcome the Catholic Inspection team to review our school and the provision at St John Vianney. We are grateful to all parents and carers who contributed their valuable feedback through the questionnaire and we extend our thanks to the inspection team for their professionalism and guidance throughout the process. On Friday morning we welcomed parents, carers and members of our local community to our Mass. It was wonderful to share this special time together in prayer. A particular well done to our GIFT team, whose welcome committee did an excellent job distributing invitations and encouraging members of the local community to join us. Our chaplaincy team has been very busy preparing for several important upcoming events. These include our “Come Dine With Us” experience, where we will welcome members of our local community to share a meal with us, as well as our Leavers’ Service and End of Year Service. It promises to be a very busy and rewarding few weeks, with many thoughtful ideas and suggestions coming directly from our dedicated chaplaincy/ GIFT team. In Religious Education this term, we are focusing on learning about world religions. This week, pupils have been exploring a range of religious artefacts and using their observation and thinking skills to infer how these items are used in worship and daily life. At Key Stage 3, students are studying Hinduism; at Key Stage 4, Islam; and at Key Stage 5, Buddhism

Mrs Garfin

Poetry Corner

A ‘Pond Beats’ Poetry Workshop – Deep Listening and Creative Writing We were delighted to welcome our former poet in residence Oliver Lomax back to Saint John Vianney School this week to deliver an inspiring ‘Pond Beats’ poetry workshop. The visit is part of a creative collaboration with The Poetry Society and The National Trust, bringing together poetry, soundscape recordings and nature in an exciting learning experience. Our pupils created a poetry passport and journeyed into the magical world of ponds and ghost ponds, listening closely to a secret and busy kingdom of fascinating creatures and plants. They discovered the environmental importance of the unique pond habitat and explored how the renewal of ghost ponds aids biodiversity. Listening to hydrophone recordings of ponds pupils wrote their own poems in response to this underwater kingdom exploring personification and metaphor. This unique project helped our young poets develop their confidence as writers while also deepening their understanding of nature and the environment. We are proudly sharing some of their amazing writing below.   Oliver says:

“It was such a joy to return to SJV this week, I’ve really missed everyone at this amazing school! Much gratitude to all the staff for their kindness and support in the sessions, and to Miss Graham for organising such a wonderful visit. There was so much fun and laughter today, matched with powerful poetic responses to the writing prompts, pupils wrote beautiful Haikus and poems, there are some very talented young poets at this school, I’m proud to have been a small part of their creative journey.”

  For more information about the Pond Beats project with The Poetry Society and The National Trust please follow the link below: https://renewbiodiversity.org.uk/pond-beats/ Oliver has kindly shared the resource he designed for the Poetry Society here, so everyone at home can have a go at writing a poem! Click on the link to listen to the Hydrophone recordings of the pond and follow the prompts to create your own:   https://resources.poetrysociety.org.uk/lesson/pond-beats-send-guidance/

Useful Information

Update on Free School Meals from September 2026   

 

We would like to inform you of important changes to Free School Meals (FSM) following updated guidance. From September 2026, all children in households receiving Universal Credit will be eligible for free school meals, regardless of income. We strongly encourage all families to apply regardless of your current position. Please note that current transitional protections will end at the end of the 2025–2026 academic year. Eligibility will be automatically rechecked, and we will confirm this with families from September 2026. There will also be two categories of FSM:

• Targeted FSM (for households on Universal Credit with income of £7,400 or less), and
• Expanded FSM (for all households on Universal Credit).

Further details will follow. In the meantime, please ensure applications are submitted where appropriate via the online form. https://apply.cloudforedu.org.uk/ofsm/sims-trafford If you have any queries, please contact either Mr Cooper or Miss Watson who will be able to support you.

Explore what’s on at We Invented the Weekend festival 2026!

Across Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th June Salford Quays and MediaCity will be buzzing with over 200 free activities in the UK’s most ambitious, creative, original and fun-filled festival celebrating the most precious of commodities – our free time! Click on the link for the full programme: weinventedtheweekend

- Mrs J Griffin, Family Liaison Officer, Deputy Safeguarding Lead.

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Click here to visit our Online Safety Hub for more useful tips and advice.

Click on the following link to open a directory of useful links and information about facilities, activities and support available to you and your young person: INFORMATION DIRECTORY