Dear parents and carers,

First, I want to personally thank you for supporting our behaviour policy over the past two years. As a result, the school has been transformed, with lessons always quiet, purposeful and disruption free. 

I also want to let you know that we have made a significant change to our policy regarding exclusions. I appreciate that this may not be applicable to you directly, as the majority of students have never been excluded, but I want to share the overview of the changes so that you are aware. 

In summary, we are introducing two new alternative options in order to avoid excluding students if there is a viable alternative: 

• The first is Internal Reflection, which will generally be used as an alternative to Fixed Term Exclusions. Students who would have previously been sent home for a number of days will instead spend the same number of days in our Internal Reflection room. They will be fully supervised by our staff while completing work. This ensures that the sanction received is the same, but alleviates the burden on parents to be at home during the exclusion, and means that we can ensure they are completing work. 

• For more serious cases, or cases which require the student to be offsite for a period of time, we have made arrangements with other local schools for students to instead spend time in their behaviour unit, instead of serving their exclusions at home. 

There are two key aims to these changes:

1. To ensure that our standards remain as high as ever - disruptive or otherwise inappropriate behaviour will continue not to be tolerated

2. To minimise the impact on the excluded student's education by ensuring they continue learning, and to alleviate the pressure on parents to supervise an excluded child during the day

Please note that we will still reserve the ability to exclude students where the above options are not suitable. We will also continue to use permanent exclusions in the (exceedingly rare) cases where a student's behaviour is serious enough to warrant it.

These changes were approved by the December Governing Body meeting, and will take effect from 1st January 2022. The full, updated policy can be found on our website.

Again, thank you very much for your support of Holmleigh Park, and I hope you and your families have a very enjoyable school holiday.

Best wishes,

James King

Deputy Headteacher - Student Culture