Headlines By James Saunders 18th January 2019
us to tackle these issues more effectively. As a result we will be increasing opportunities for learners and offering more considered catch up sessions that may be able to take place earlier. I would like to thank those of you that attended the parent forum at school this week. I have always found these events to be highly valuable, if a little nerve wracking. I can never prepare for them as I don’t know what issues parents and the local community would like to discuss. However, saying that, it seemed to me that the changes I put forward last week would surely form part of our discussions. I hope that I was able to address the questions and concerns that parents raised regarding their children. I thought it would be useful to provide a quick summary of the topics we discussed: We talked about the rationale for moving from 3X100 minute lessons to 4X75 minute lessons. Some concerns were about there being an increase in IS (homework) I reassured parents that this has been considered and next week I shall be sharing more details about the communication of IS to parents - In the meantime please read the supplement provided by Mr White on our use of Google Classroom. I spoke about spaced learning and moving knowledge from short term to long term memory and how spacing study over more learning sessions could help facilitate this. I also spoke about how the creation of the timetable would be more flexible and would help us to reduce classes where children have more than one teacher. We talked about the change of Wednesday to be inline with every other day. There was some concern about extracurricular and enrichment opportunities, particularly around intervention/revision groups for year 11. The rationale around placing the form time at the end of the day is to help
I found the whole experience very helpful and tried to be transparent and honest in all my responses. I hope that those parents that attended left feeling more reassured and informed. I shall share more detailed feedback about our discussion around homework and communication next week. One of the other big topics was our change to the guided choice subjects that form our Key stage 4 curriculum. This will be shared with our C8 learners via assembly and they will be completing an initial survey to indicate levels of interest so that we may ensure staffing is at the correct level (especially for new subjects). The main change is to our core MFL option. Previously learners have had to select from either French, German or Spanish. This option block is now called Liberal Arts core and has Geography and History added to increase the range of choices learners have. Learners will then choose from two further option blocks that contain either The Arts or The Sciences as their foundation knowledge domain. For the final choice learners have a free choice across both those blocks. We will also be introducing a further language - Latin, as well as Health and Social Care, Higher Project Qualification and a stand alone option for Triple Science so that there is more time allotted to this qualification. Naturally our current learners in C9 and C10 will be wondering how these changes will affect them.
Core subjects for all learners: English Maths Science PE Choice 1
Choice 2
Choice 3
Choice 4
Liberal Arts (Core) French German Spanish Geography History
Liberal Arts (Core) French German Spanish Geography History Creative & Liberal Arts Art Drama Dance HPQ Latin Media Music PE Philosophy & RE
Science & Industry Triple Science Computer Science Business Studies Food Technology Health & Social Care Graphic Design Resistant Materials Textiles
Any subject from the following 3 domains:
Science & Industry
Liberal Arts (Ebacc)
Creative & Liberal Arts
Contd..