Message from the head

I’m surrounded by a strong team of people and over the years I’ve learnt to delegate and plan pretty well. There are some days, however, where no amount of planning seems to prepare you for the day ahead.

I arrived in school early on Thursday morning after an issue on Wednesday evening required me to answer calls and emails until far too late. I had a quick meeting about teacher assessed grades and then tried to do a lesson sweep on Lumsdale site (this is where senior leaders ‘sweep’ through classrooms to ensure that students are meeting teachers’ expectations). I had only managed two classrooms when a teacher popped his head out of his classroom and said, ‘there’s a dog on the field’. For reasons I can’t explain I asked, ‘what breed?’ (like that would make a difference). He paused and then said doubtfully, ‘I’m not sure…perhaps a beagle…?’ I set off down the stairs, but he stopped me urgently and said, ‘wait…it might be a beagle cross…’

Armed with this vital information I arrived on the fields to be briefed by our assistant site manager. A woman had inherited a nervous dog from a deceased relative (long story) and couldn’t get it to return to her. For the next 15 minutes we calmly approached the beagle type animal only to get within inches before it bolted. During this time students were coming onto their lunch break and were enjoying the unfolding scene. At one point a helpful neighbour spotted me and shouted, ‘would you like a little food treat, Mr Marsh?’ distractedly I replied, ‘no, thanks - it’s lunch in twenty minutes’. ‘No,’ he said…’for the dog’. The owner of the dog shouted, ‘sausages?’ (somewhat optimistically, I thought). From inside the house I thought I heard the neighbour shout, ‘they’re frozen…’ All of this was so interesting to Rollo the beagle (cross?) that the owner was able to creep up and grab him from behind. This drew a ripple of applause from the 400 students who had watched the scene unfold.

Anyway, when eventually I got back to my lesson sweep… in DT I saw a teacher use all his experience to identify and fill a gap. An insecurity in knowledge emerged and so the teacher stopped and asked the students to reflect silently on the answer (how to quickly find the centre of a rectangle - this should be basic for a Y7). Eventually he asked a student who he suspected may not know. The student received a helpful prompt from a colleague before happily demonstrating the technique (use diagonal intersection) on the board. Gap filled.

And Katie M in Y11 stopped me on bus duty and told me that her garage had been burgled and her limbo pole stolen. ‘How low can you go?’ she asked, sadly. How I laughed.

Finally, our efforts continue to reduce our carbon footprint. Before Christmas we failed in our application to attract funding for a ground source heat pump. Now we are awaiting the outcome of our application (via Salix) to make significant modifications to our buildings to make us more energy efficient. I will let you know how that goes. We are well aware of our problems regarding the recycling of plastics and are working on that too.

Oh, and here’s a beautiful photo I found in lessons (Ross, in Y11).

Busy times. Have a marvellous weekend, all.

We are Highfields.