Message from the headteacher

Liz Cruise is a bit like Santa. I don’t mean that she is jolly and wears a lot of red but rather that she is very generous and appears to be in lots of different locations at the same time. For example, on a very busy teaching day she can be seen below bagging up donations to Rags2riches4schools only milliseconds before appearing in a classroom delivering an excellent geography lesson. She is the epitome of a community minded person and we are so proud to have her as a member of our team.

The other person seen in this picture is sixth form pastoral manager Rachel Sargeant and she also has the ability to appear in several places at once. Below, for example, she appears in a picture taken on the steps of Number 10 Downing Street. On this occasion she was leading a trip for a small group of carefully selected sixth formers to the home of the British Prime Minister. They were the guests of Alice Mathews who is both a government advisor AND a Highfields alumnus. She has visited the school and spoken to students and here ensured that our young people had unrivalled access to the corridors of power. We are hugely appreciative of Alice’s investment in our students - these experiences can totally inspire young people and I am now more sure than ever that a Highfields graduate will one day be prime minister.

Which brings me to ask you a favour of you, like Alice, were educated at Highfields. We will soon be reaching out for the first time to Highfields alumni. We are desperate to enhance further the links between school and workplace. Please will you respond to any social media you see from September which encourages you to make contact with us if you are in a workplace which may be interesting for our students to understand from your point of view. This is pretty much any workplace. Before their interaction with Alice, students had very little interest in policy making but the portrayal of her life and work has inspired many of them to consider politics as a way to change things for the better.

635 learning walks documented this year so far and this week I was in a range of lessons in which teachers were explaining WHY the learning was being undertaken, for example in an MFL lesson regarding the ability to describe clothing in Spanish. This is part of an ongoing mission amongst our teachers to contextualise and frame learning, especially for those who don’t have immediate understanding the value of learning.

Finally, I just wanted to say thank you to Mason in Y7 who came straight from his food tech lesson to offer me this cheese crumpet. It was so soft and cheesy and delicious that I had eaten half of it before remembering to take a photo.

Have a soft and cheesy weekend.

We are Highfields.

A Marsh Headteacher