Message from the head

Both of my cats are ill. I know this is nothing to do with school but I thought you should know. They are brothers who I have now had in my life for nearly 20 years so I always expected that it would come to this, but I am bit sad about it. I knew things were getting bad when one of them, who previously had catlike agility (obviously) misjudged the leap up onto a work surface in the utility room, fell short and somehow ended up in the drum of the washing machine. Every time I take them to the vets I have the terrible fear that we won’t all come back alive.

Anyway, luckily I have Highfields students and goings-on to distract me during the day. For example, the all-weather pitch at Lumsdale is coming on. The poles for the fence are in! I was a bit mystified when a year 9 student asked me what they were building as I thought everyone was aware. I told him and then asked him what he had thought they might be building. ‘I don’t know…’, he said, ‘…a stadium?’ He looked mildly disappointed.

Meanwhile at lower site a dance teacher had made the very understandable decision to take her lesson out into the bucolic majesty of the Starkholmes playing fields. There are worse places to learn how to dance.

I love dance and went to see a ballet last weekend in Birmingham whose music was written by a friend with whom I studied. It was quite a contemporary piece about climate change (better than I’m making it sound here). Which reminds me that I heard a BRILLIANT piece of music this week by Billy in Y12: a nod to the work of Villa-Lobos and other composers influenced by Iberian music at the turn of the last century.

We’ve been working really hard on our improvement projects for next year. Just in case you are still reading here are the big concepts we are interested in …

Cognitive apprenticeship - yeah! This is all about deconstructing the way in which experts approach their discipline. As good as my mate, the ballet composer, might be at his job I can tell you from experience he is awful at communicating his method to others. As teachers, that is our role and we need to get even better at explicitly breaking down the decisions we make as expert musicians, dancers, geographers, physicists!

Restorative approaches - boom! This is a set of approaches and strategies which seek to enhance the quality of relationships in school. If we get it right we should see relationships improve, unkind behaviours reduce, recurrence of poor behaviour dwindle … IF we get it right …

Peer on peer interactions - this is in response to a national focus on gender relationships. We want to ensure that boys and girls enjoy positive relations in school and that both feel happy and secure in our school community. This work is informed by some evidence around female students’ experiences in secondary schools nationally. So … busy, busy, busy. Have a good weekend and remember: we are Highfields.