- 16/7/12 Extended Curriculum Week Starts Y7,8,9.
- 16/7/12 Y10 Work Experience continues.
- 20/7/12 Summer Term ends.
- 6/9/12 New School Year starts.
Message from Mr Nixon
Today is the last day of formal school
with Extended Curriculum Week taking place all next week. With year 10 out on work experience, the rest
of our students will be learning in various places from Norwich to the Lake
District to Europe. As you know Ofsted
carried out a subject inspection of Maths on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week
and once the report is published it will be put on the web site. The inspection was rigorous and thorough and
at the end of his verbal feedback I thanked him for his professionalism
throughout the two days.
The summer term tends to be the season
for staff moving and this can be for a variety of reasons including retirement,
promotion or for personal reasons. I
have always believed in having the right balance of established staff and new
staff and have mentioned before about the rigour of our recruitment process to
ensure the school continues to develop.
Stephen Abbott (the Maths Inspector)
said that numbers can be meaningless unless they are put in context so I am
going to try and follow his lead. As a
school we have the equivalent of 113 permanent teachers and this year seventeen
of them are leaving. Of that number we
wish Trevor Gower and Cliff Finch a very happy retirement after long service to
the school. To put the numbers in
context at the end of the summer term (2009/ 2010) eleven permanent staff left
and last year (2010/11) twelve left. As
a percentage it means a staff turn-over of between ten and fifteen percent
which is quite typical in a large school and one moving forward at a pace.
Although it is still July (though the
weather suggests February) I am already looking forward to the start of the new
academic year in September. There is
much to do but a large amount of good work to build on. Have an excellent holiday.
