The Circus is in Town!

Having just retruned from the school playground I can report having seen an interesting site. We have a Circus on the field! There are lots of workers erecting the big top, a range of vehicles containing interesting pieces of apparatus and a wide range of characters who will clearly play a part in the show tonight. There aren't any animals, which is a relief, but otherwise it is the circus we all know and probably haven't visited.

We entered a Year 6 Cross Country competition this week at Eastwood High School. The children have been training with Mr Hautler over the past 3 weeks with hopes of doing well in the competition. We had some significant succcess - a brilliant effort for a first attempt. Well done children.

An apology

In our home school agreement we have a statement about learning from our mistakes. Well, I must confess to making a mistake and I have certainly learned from it!

When I first started writing this blog I wanted to write it every week. That proved to be too ambitious so I tried to do it every other week. That too proved to be to difficult and to my horror I have discovered that I haven't written anything new since June! I am very sorry!!! This year I am going to be disciplined and write the blog whenever I have something to say.

I am very proud of our children today It has been European Day of Languages and the children have taken to the theme like ducks to water. During the day different classes have learnt French,German, Finnish, Spanish, Czech and Polish. Some children have actually learnt three of these - and some of them have significant learning difficulties. We gathered as a school at the end of the day to celebrate the learning and it was brilliant. Thank you children for making my day!

Keeping Up!

Keeping up with a blog is very hard. I started this strand with the best intentions of updating and adding to my news on a daily basis, which quickly became at least once a week and now has become when I remember. Quite a shocking state of affairs really. The trouble is there are so many different things going on at once during the school day that it is hard to know what to focus upon.

Over the next few weeks we are going to be settling upon the organisation of classes and teachers for the next academic year. Our pupil numbers are a little fluid so we don't have steady groups of 30 or 60 to divide neatly into classes according to the government guidance. We have very peculaira numbers as we are able to admit up to 60 per year group. So we have 42 in reception next year - a nice number giving two small classes of 22. In Year 1 however at the moment we have 36 - we can't have one class as it is far too big and can't afford to have two classes either. So what do we do? In Year 2 next year there will be 34 children - too big for one class and too small for 2. What do we do? Well we sound out opinions and do the best that we can for the majority of the children that we have in the school. Probably we are going to have to mix age groups again - not the best or most popular solution but the most practical.

Then there is the allocation of teachers to classes.....watch this space for further details of that!!

Visitors

I'm always very proud to show visitors around our school. The children are always lovely and the classrooms so warm and welcoming. It is a treat for me and people who come to visit always leave with very positive views. Today we were visited by 43 members of staff from a school in Oslo (which is in Norway despite what Mr Duff thinks) called Mankerud. The principal, Mr Morten Sesseng, contacted me some months ago to arrange the visit after seeing our school website and hearing me talk at another school. The visitors spent the whole day with us and when they left they were full of praise for the children and the teaching that they had seen. They said that our children were a credit to us and to their parents, that they had seen some learning that they would never forget and they wished that they could reproduce our school within theirs! As you can imagine this made me feel very proud and I left school tonight feeling taller than ever!

Summer Term

The Summer Term starts today. This should be a very busy period of the year with lots of exciting things happening over the course of the next three months or so. The term started really well yesterday - a group of 34 children and 3 members of staff left the school at around 10 am to begin the annual school journey to the Isle of Wight. By the time the rest of the teacher had finished their working day the travellers had arrived at their destination, unpacked, explored and prepared for their first activity.

This morning, Tuesday, is the first day of term for the children and we opened the doors at 8.00am for our breakfast club members. Around 50 of our keenest pupils were waiting at the door for their breakfast cereal, toast and drinks. Most looked a little heavy around the eyelids as though getting up had been a bit of a struggle today! Mind you most of the adult looked quite similar and they were is school for the day yesterday!.

Escape Artists

This morning we had a runaway. One of our newest recruits, a little boy in Year 1, decided that he did not want to stay at school at the end of playtime and he simply ran home. How? Well we are situated on a big site and although we have security gates we cannot lock them due to Health and Safety restrictions. He simply decided to take advantage of a gate that was left open by a parent leaving the site. He was seen running out and despite a school policy of not chasing runners we did make sure that he was safe and that he went home (one of our LSAs followed him with an older child). The little boy was returned to school by his parents but he was in no fit state to stay in school so he went back home and will start the day again after lunch. Now we only have the problem of how to ensure that the gates stayed closed!

New Half Term

Another half term has started and we are half way through the academic year. Time flies when you have targets to meet!

Earlier this week I met with my School Improvement Partner - part of an initiative launched by the Government to enable schools to have access to advice, support and challenge from an external person other than the local authority. In essence this is a very good idea - but our SIP is actually the same person as the local authority used as their link adviser to the school so nothing has really changed. We have a three to four hour meeting every half term and we discuss issues pertinent to the school at the time. Mostly we discuss data - figures that show how well our children are progressing towards the targets that have been set for them and collectively how the targets compare with our current academic position. We also talk about contextual issues and matters relating to the future of the school. The process is not a great deal of fun and involves lots of paperwork and poring over figures. The government intention is that the process is useful to Headteachers - well it isn't to this one!

Last night after school there was a Governors Personnel Committee meeting. The agenda wasn't particularly full but there was a lot to talk about. Most of our time was spent discussing something called "Single Status". This is another Government initiative that is supposed to address a few issues in relation to the employment of staff members who are not employed on teachers contracts. The intention is to ensure that people employed in the same or very similar jobs are paid the same or very similar and have common working expectations. Sounds simple really. Sadly it isn't and has caused quite a lot of work, some anxiety and tension. The process may calso cost a lot of money to implement and may result in less people being employed in the long run. What is supposed to be easy and straightforward has turned out to be a bit of a nightmare!