Headteacher’s message

As I may have explained before, a lockdown school is a surprisingly busy school. We have three key projects currently on the go. Our first is the remote learning offer which we are putting out. On Monday I was in a live lesson and heard parents helpfully giving advice on how to mute. It reminded me that you are our partners in this adventure and so soon we will be offering you the chance to give us some feedback, if you have it, via a MS Forms survey. If you have feedback before then, please try subject teachers or year teams as they are likely to be able to solve any issues far more quickly than I will. We know what our strengths are and we have a good idea of our areas for improvement, but it will be interesting to get your views.

Our second is HISS (Highfields In School Support) which we are offering to children of keyworkers and vulnerable children. I am hugely grateful to all the staff who are supervising these children as they undertake the same work offered to students working at home.

Our third is testing for staff to try and identify and reduce the number of asymptomatic cases of Covid on site. I don’t know how they have done it but the team of teachers and support staff responsible for this seem to have gained very specialist skills in a very short amount of time.

On top of these projects, we are aiming to share information and strengthen our ‘We Are Highfields’ community ethos through assemblies which now include contributions from a range of staff. You may notice that our love of curriculum learning is balanced against a real concern about children’s emotional and physical wellbeing. I have been lucky enough to secure a place in school for my kids this time, but I know from the last lockdown that it can bring a feeling of isolation and dislocation even in the most organised of family households (which mine definitely isn’t).

All this is leading up to an apology. I was so tired late last night as I finalised assembly and uploaded to YouTube that I omitted a tutorial video on MS Teams that Mr O’Reilly had worked very hard to make the assembly deadline for. So … apologies to Mr O’Reilly and to anyone else who was a bit mystified by that section of this morning’s assembly. I understand we have sent the link for the video separately - it also available on the school website.

On the subject of assemblies, I would like to thank any staff member who has taken the time to contribute. Which reminds me…I have assemblies to thank for the fact that this weekend I need to research giving blood and also make a Thai curry with sticky coconut rice.

Whatever you get up to this weekend, I hope you have a nice one.

We are Highfields.

A Marsh Headteacher