Dear all,

We've had another great week. We have now welcomed close to one hundred prospective families for tours of the school, and it has been wonderful to hear their comments on how focused the students are in every single classroom. Your children continue to amaze us with their resilience and dedication, and I particularly want to recognise Year 11 - they have taken to Period 6s with great enthusiasm, with attendance of 100% almost every day. They are going to do incredibly well.

A year ago, I wrote to you discussing how I wanted to improve communication with the school. I hope you'll agree that we've made good progress, but we want to get even better. I am therefore pleased to share that over half term, we'll be introducing an app for parents which will allow you to get updates and alerts, access your children's timetables, view their attendance and so on - all from your phone. More details will follow, but for now, if we don't already have the correct email address for you (i.e. you don't receive at one or more emails per week from us), please click here to update your details. 

My highlight this week has been judging our first House Competition, which was photography. With a topic of "change", students were judged on both the technical quality of the shot, and the story behind it. We had over one hundred entries, and it was incredibly difficult to pick a winner, but eventually the judges settled on Acacia (Javelin House), whose photograph perfectly captures the changes in society from generation to generation. 

The winners can be viewed below:

1st - Acacia (Year 10, Javelin)

2nd - Jessica (Year 11, Hurricane)

3rd - Zak (Year 13, Javelin)

Highly Commended - Sara (Year 12, Meteor)

Highly Commended - Shayla (Year 9, Typhoon)

This means that Javelin move into first place at the time of writing, but it remains close! You can view the live scores by clicking here. 

Finally, a quick reminder about uniform. Thanks to you all, our students always look incredibly smart. This is incredibly important as it sets the tone for focusing on learning and high standards at school. Last year, we checked uniform every morning in line up, but as you know we are currently not conducting a whole school line up so that we can keep students in bubbles, and perhaps as a result, a few things have just slipped slightly. In particular, please can I gently remind parents that trousers should be long enough to reach the shoe laces. Financial assistance is available for those who need it - please contact us directly to discuss this.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend,

Mr Farmbrough