Christmas Head Teacher Update 20 December 2023

Headteacher Update

We’ve made it to the end of term! Huge thanks to all students, staff, parents/carers and partners for their support, hard work and commitment to all that we do here in Balwearie High School. This newsletter will highlight just some of the things that have been going on since the last update and will also provide additional information about key upcoming events and activities as we head into the new year.

Staffing Updates

We are delighted to have welcomed Mr Wilson to our Maths team this term and are also delighted that Mrs Williams will be supporting our learners in our Pupil Support Department as she takes on a temporary part-time post in this department early in the new year and will also continue to teach some RME throughout the week.

Important Information & Updates

S1 Pupils change to lunchtime arrangements

From Term 3 (Jan 2024) S1 pupils will be allowed to leave the school grounds over lunchtime (13.20pm) if they wish to buy lunch in the local community or have a home lunch. Pupils should remember they are representing the school when they are out in the community and should therefore be responsible with regards to conduct, disposing of litter and practising good timekeeping to ensure they are not late to class period 6 (14.05pm). Pupils should remain in the school grounds over break.

Pupil Leadership Team Consultation

Our Pupil Leaders have been working with the HT to look at a more equitable and inclusive post title for these important roles in school that better represents and includes all pupils in our school. We are considering changing the role title from 'Head Boy' and 'Head Girl', which has been in place for approx 6 years, to 'School Captains'. The role itself will remain unchanged but we believe this will allow all young people to aspire to these positions within our Pupil Leadership Team. We are interested in the views of our whole school community regarding this proposal and have begun this process with staff and students. So far, there is strong support for this change with pupils and staff recognising the opportunity to use more inclusive language and approaches. We’ll continue the consultation with our students into next session and would be grateful if you could complete this short form to share your views as parents/carers before we arrive at our final decision at the end of January,

Fife Council – Curriculum and Learning Hours

Fife Council are working with Secondary Head Teachers to deliver equitable learning hours (27.5hrs per week) to all secondary aged learners in Fife following the recommendations from the Scottish Government earlier this year. As such, we are undergoing a review of our curriculum model and our school week to ensure that Balwearie High School delivers these outcomes for our young people. There will be a communication to parents/carers in the new year to provide further information and allow parents/carers to share their views.

School App

We have been made aware that our school app is currently not working with some newer versions of Android operating systems. We have instructed our supplier to re-build our app to rectify this issue. We will be back in touch once the new update app is available in the Google Play Store.

In the meantime, please see the below video that we have produced to help everyone download the app and make sure notifications setting are correct.

In addition, we have recently had a few queries regarding our Mobile Device & ICT Policy. This can be found in the school policy section of the website - https://www.balweariehigh.co.uk/Mobile-Device-ICT-Policy/

Prelims

In January our S4 - S6 learners will be undertaking preliminary examinations in a range of subjects. Please see below details of our prelim diet and S4-S6 Study Support sessions.

Parents' / Carers' Evenings

Over the past few weeks we have received a small number of queries regarding our Virtual Parents'/Carers' evenings and why we have continued with them.

We have found our virtual system offers many advantages to our whole school community including:

• Increased attendance compared to our pre-virtual evenings. Statistical data shows that S1 Parents' Evening attendance has increased by 11% , S3 increased by 3% and S4 increased by 16% compared to pre-virtual.
• More flexibility for families to join us without the added logistics of travelling to Balwearie.
• Flexibility for blended families to join.
• Reduction in childcare implications for families to attend.
• Keeping to the scheduled timings. Prior to the virtual system it was commonplace for parents'/carers' evenings to run over by up to one hour. A regular frustration for families and staff.

We review all our processes and approaches regularly and engage regularly with our Parent Council body for their views and will do so again in planning for session 2024-25.

Litter in our Community

We are aware of an increase in concern from our local community regarding litter dropped by our young people during lunch times in particular. We recognise that the vast majority of our young people respect our local community and environment and dispose of rubbish properly, but it’s disappointing to hear that there are a few young people who are not doing so. I can completely understand the frustrations of local residents regarding this matter. As a school, we have responded as quickly as we can and have reiterated, through year group assemblies, the expectations of our young people when they are out and about in the community. We continue to have litter picking volunteers from our student body who head out into the community to help alleviate the problem as often as possible, accompanied by a member of staff. Our Business Manager has also been working with our partners in the Safer Communities team and we have discussed the possibility of additional patrols to help which have been reduced recently due to staff absence. Ideally, we’d prefer none of our students to drop any litter, but the reality is this may continue to happen from time to time. We’ll do our best to increase staff presence within the community at lunchtimes (particularly to support our S1 students who may head out and about) and are grateful for parents/carers reiterating to young people what their responsibilities are as part of our school community both during the school day and beyond. We’d always prefer our wider community to contact us directly if they have any concerns so we can work directly with them to target our work and support where we can.

Improvement Focus Term 3: Ensuring Wellbeing, Equality and Inclusion

Mrs McLaren will be leading us through key aspects of our improvement work next term in her role as our DHT with overall responsibility for our work against this priority. We’ll be focusing on de-escalation and restorative approaches, ensuring pupil wellbeing and equity and universal supports for all our learners.

Celebrating Success

Young STEM Leaders

Congratulations to Archie, Bracken, Jodie and Madison who are our Young Stem Leaders. They represented Balwearie brilliantly and presented in front of 30 teachers who were aspiring STEM subject principal teachers/curriculum leaders who were on a two day training course. The group prepared a presentation and activity to demonstrate the important leadership skills that they are developing and the qualities they look for in a leader.

MVP

Congratulations to Mrs Williams and the MVP team who raised over £900 towards our selected charities - Women's Aid & FRASAC. We were also positively recognised for our contribution to the ‘Reclaim the Night’ event and were visited by MVP leads to find out more about our programme and activities in school.

Cash for Kids & Kirkcaldy Foodbank

We’re delighted to update you that we are reaching out to support approx 123 families through our Cash for Kids funding. We’ve also been busy collecting our donations for the Kirkcaldy foodbank to help local families during the festive period. Well done to Mrs Johnstone and her team for organising and coordinating this important work.

Practical Cake Craft Prelim Practise

Our students were in early doors recently to get practising their final cake designs for their upcoming prelim. Here’s a sneak peek at their crafty work – absolutely brilliant!