Dear Parents / Guardians

It has been another brilliant week at HP High School and I would like to share some of the highlights with you.

Firstly I would like to welcome home those students who have returned from the South of France watersports trip, at the same time waving off 60 students this week to go to Paris. From the social media posts it looks like they are having a great time!

We have held a successful ‘Meet the Head’ evening. Over 200 parents attended and as always, your support and feedback is greatly appreciated. At the meeting, we discussed the reasons behind why attending in correct uniform and with the correct equipment is so important, as well as the significance of the morning routines. I would like to thank you for your support. We now have nearly every single child attending school in full uniform and fully equipped. This means every second in every lesson is now focussed on learning, rather than these other issues. I am delighted to share that behaviour has been very good this week, with almost every lesson disruption free.

Our fantastic Tutor Reading Programme is in full swing with some children already having read sixty pages of their first novel. Titles range from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to Fahrenheit 451 and from I am Malala to I am Legend.

We have continued to provide feedback to our teachers, with virtually all teachers now having been observed and targets set. On the subject of teaching I would like to warmly welcome Kinza Barrett, our new Head of Maths. She has arrived from the extremely high performing Maths Department at GLT sister school, Yate Academy. I am confident that she is going to make rapid improvements in Maths at our school.

We have also welcomed visitors from the Robinswood Trust this week. The Chair and CEO were blown away by how well your children were behaving and engaging in their lessons. We look forward to working in partnership with this fantastic and growing Multi Academy Trust.

I was delighted to hold an assembly with Year 12 students this week, where we discussed the commitment that we have as a school to ensuring that they progress to the best possibly university or apprenticeship, or take successful first steps to employment. It was especially brilliant that we were able to hold this in the refectory, surrounded by the excellent art exhibition currently on display.

As I hope you have, seen our new website is now live. Whilst this is still under construction and a little sparse, we will be adding to it over the coming weeks. This will be the main vehicle for sharing information about our rapidly improving school.

Finally, I can confirm that details about the new uniform and PE kit will be sent out next week.

I hope you have a great weekend and we get a little bit of sunshine! With best wishes

Ben Parnell