SPIRIT - The newsletter for The Holy Spirit Catholic Mac - Summer 2020

The Holy Spirit Catholic Multi Academy

SPIRIT

The

Holy Spirit Catholic Multi Academy

Newsletter for The Holy Spirit Catholic MAC

The In the last edition of Spirit I wished all our families a happy Christmas and hoped that 2020 would bring you everything that you would wish. Little did I or you ever imagine what the new year had in store. Since then the whole world has been consumed by Covid 19, the country has been profoundly affected and so too has the education of all your children. Like everyone else the staff of the Holy Spirit have had to deal with a situation that nobody had ever seen before. But, my goodness, how they have risen to the challenge! Mrs Smith sets out the detail overleaf but I just want to mention a couple of the key features.

One of the six pillars of the Holy Spirit Experience is Social Action and we had made huge progress in this key area that is central to our faith. No sooner had the thunderbolt of Covid 19 arrived than the MAC responded like never before. The Holy Spirit MAC Foodbank was quickly established, initially by your generous food donations and then when demand outstripped supply we launched our MAC Just Giving page. Your generosity was stunning and in three days you donated over £5,000 which will enable us to continue to support our most vulnerable families during the summer holiday.

And of course we haven’t forgotten the day job. Despite the lockdown every single child and young person has been following a clear home learning programme and their progress has been monitored constantly by staff who speak to them regularly and check not just their work but their wellbeing too. We’ve been especially conscious of those in their final year of GCSE and A Level whose education has been interrupted at a crucial stage. We are absolutely determined to ensure our Year 13 students transition to the places and courses they intended. And similarly for those in Year 11, the vast majority of whom will join the sixth form in September.

And so, at the end of an extraordinary school year none of us really knows what the future holds. But one thing we do know. The past few months have shown the community of the Holy Spirit MAC at our very best. When we stick together and look out for each other there is nothing we cannot achieve. Well done everyone!

Holy Spirit Catholic Multi Academy

The

Holy Spirit Catholic Multi Academy

Jim Foley - Chair of the Holy Spirit MAC

Issue 011 Summer 2020

Senior Executive Principal Update Mrs Sinead Smith

As we come to the end of the school year, it seems incredible to look back at all that has happened since we entered 2020. I am sure it is true to say that most of us will never see a year quite like 2020 again in our lifetime.

As a community of students, staff and families we have lived through a moment in history which will undoubtedly form part of the history curriculum for generations to come. At this point in the year, it seems right to pause for a moment to reflect on what we have learnt about our MAC community over the last five months. So, here are a few things we know now with more certainty than ever:

We are stronger together…

We have always seen the benefits of working collaboratively as a group of schools in the Holy Spirit MAC but never has it been more apparent than in recent months. Our ability to support colleagues and students across all MAC schools has been invaluable and our collective approach to planning for the partial closure and subsequent reopening has allowed us to be calm in the face of many challenges.

We look after one another…

As many of you will know, the impact of Covid 19 for many families has been devastating. With sudden job losses and a lack of income, many families are experiencing financial hardship like never before. For this reason we set up the Holy Spirit MAC Foodbank which was initially sustained by your very generous donations of food. However, as our supplies of food eventually ran out we asked you to help by donating to our MAC Just Giving page… and my goodness you responded to our call for help! Within just 72 hours, you donated over £5000! Your donations, combined with funds committed by the MAC Board of Directors, have enabled us to fund the MAC Foodbank throughout the summer term and will enable us to continue to provide support over the summer break also. My pride in our collective response to a need in our community is beyond measure!

Our children are remarkable and resilient…

With little warning, children of all ages had to adapt to a new way of life. A life that didn’t include face to face contact with teachers, friends or even family members. Whilst this change has undoubtedly been challenging for children across the Holy Spirit MAC, we have been truly overwhelmed and inspired by the resilience, perseverance and resourcefulness we have witnessed from children of all ages. Not only have they adapted to the self-motivation needed to learn at home but they have weathered the isolation from friends and family admirably.

There is no doubt that many of the skills the children have developed throughout lockdown will stand them in very good stead when they return to normal school life.

Our TikTok attempts tell us not to give up the day job…

Through the medium of TikTok, staff across the MAC went to great lengths to keep the children entertained and to let them know we are still here and thinking of them. Whilst our new found performance skills were a source of great amusement and excitement for staff and children alike… we won’t be giving up the day job any time soon!

We may not know exactly what the future holds but we know we can rise to any challenge…

At the moment we are preparing to welcome all pupils in the Holy Spirit MAC back to school in September. We don’t know exactly what this return will look like or what challenges we might encounter along the way but what we do know is that, as a community, we can rise to any challenge!

So, as we end the school year, I offer a note of sincere gratitude. Firstly to parents in the Holy Spirit MAC. You became teachers overnight and you worked with us to continue to do the best for your child. For that, thank you! To the children- we always knew you were fantastic but you could not have made us prouder during this time.

Thank you! Finally, to the staff in the Holy Spirit MAC. You have gone so far above and beyond what might ordinarily be expected of you in order to ensure the children in our schools are safe, happy and well supported. I thank you for truly bringing our faith and mission to life.

I wish you all a safe and healthy summer and I very much look forward to the point where we once again throw the doors of every school in the Holy Spirit MAC open wide to welcome the return of every child.

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.

With God as our refuge, we need not fear.” Psalm 46

St Thomas More Catholic Academy & Sixth Form College

Mrs Leearna Thomas Acting Principal

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love”. Mother Teresa Here at St Thomas More, we have faced many challenges during lockdown yet there have been so many positives to come out of this situation which we are immensely proud of and celebrate. We have certainly been more thankful, loved more and truly appreciated all of our blessings each day.

We are immensely proud of our students and the challenges they have overcome in getting to grips with new technologies, adopting new ways of working and remote learning. Our staff have also had to quickly adapt to a new way of working and develop their remote teaching lessons to ensure students are engaged and do not fall behind as a result of the pandemic.

As a Catholic school, we are proud to demonstrate our ‘faith in action’ during these times. One of our proudest achievements has been our increased social action within the school community as part of the Holy Spirit MAC to support families experiencing financial hardship as a result of the pandemic. Through the Lenten foodbank appeal, we were able to support with the delivery of food parcels and packed lunches to students and their families.

We have been overwhelmed by the generosity of our staff, parents/carers and local community to support our foodbank appeal. A huge thank you to BAPS charity, Trade Centre UK and local farm shops for all of their generous donations in supporting our families at this time.

We have been delighted to see the return of Year 10 and 12 students for some face to face contact with their subject teachers in school. It has been especially rewarding to welcome some of our year 6 students to St Thomas More as part of their transition to secondary school. We look forward to welcoming more students back to school in September.

We may have been socially distant but today we stand more united as a school community than ever before and have truly lived out the Gospel message in everything we have achieved these past few months. We look forward to September and the day when we are reunited as a Catholic family.

My chocolate chip cookies!

SPIRIT

There has been some fantastic work going on in all faculties. Students have enjoyed the many Technology challenges as part of the ‘Innovation and Design’ group where one of the challenges focused on water buoyancy. Congratulations to Sarah Cherian in year 9 for her design of a paper origami boat! Students have also enjoyed participating in the many virtual sporting challenges too such as dance, basketball, tennis and cricket and we are delighted to have received a certificate for our commitment and achievement in the School Games Programme. Some students have taken the opportunity to practise their culinary skills during lockdown and served delicious meals to their families.

Newsletter for The Holy Spirit Catholic MAC

Throughout lockdown the safety and wellbeing of our students has been paramount and form tutors have been able to maintain healthy relationships and speak to students regularly about their lock down experiences. This regular contact has been essential to support students in maintaining a positive mental health and well-being.

Our Lady and St Joseph Catholic Academy

Mrs Sara Chapman Principal Keeping the Faith Through ‘online’ Masses, Father Simon was able to continue to engage with the children and provide new opportunities to learn. We had a virtual tour of the Sacristy to understand how Father prepares for Mass, whilst on another session he focused the children’s thoughts on the ‘rainbow’ and how this is a sign of hope and how important this is for us all.

These online interactions have been extremely well received with many children responding virtually to requests. Personal video messages from Father on our newsletter, alongside links to Collective Worship sessions, have ensured that the children have been able to continue to grow in their faith.

these ‘new skills’ have been achieved through perseverance, creativity, making mistakes etc. To celebrate and value the children’s achievements, we continued with our weekly ‘star of the week’, along with a new reading champion award! We also had a weekly ‘wall of fame’ for each class featuring some of the most exciting learning and this was shared with families

Keeping Healthy Many of us have participated in (or at least watched) some of the Joe Wickes exercise classes. These have been very popular with both children at home, at school… and even the staff!! Keeping fit & healthy has become very important during lockdown and we have encouraged our children to participate in the ‘School Games’ virtual sports competition where they were able to compete in sports such as tennis, athletics, basketball, cricket and dance. It has been wonderful to see how many children have been taking part.

We were extremely proud that one of our children, Kyan Dalton, was placed first in the virtual athletics for the whole of Warwickshire, an amazing achievement Kian!

Keeping Connected Staff at school would all agree that our ICT skills have improved over this period! We are particularly proud of our Facebook page that has helped us stay connected with our families and our videos have proved to be very popular.

The ‘Blinded Lights‘ dance proved a huge success with over 8k views. However, the videos of the children’s dances in response made us realise just how much we are all missing one another. We look forward to seeing the OLSTJ talent show and sharing news on the winners very soon.

Keeping in Touch

Keeping Engaged Staff have provided bespoke home learning, continuing to refine and develop these packages each week.. We are particularly proud of the breadth of learning, ensuring that in addition to the core subject there is provision to learn within the wider curriculum, with links to French, Art, Technology, etc. We value all the hard work delivered by parents and acknowledge

During lockdown the Pastoral Team have been supporting many of the families within our school that have been experiencing difficulties. From supporting bereavements through phone calls and home visits to the staff taking children for a walk to the park with their parents to reduce their anxiety about leaving the house. We have been proud to lend a friendly ear to some of our parents who have been isolated during lockdown and who needed support themselves and just someone to talk to.

We now excitedly await the return of all our wonderful children and families. We miss you, we thank you and we can’t wait to see you soon!

St Anne’s Catholic Academy

Mrs Sarah Hubbard Principal Love and learning As a principal you often feel a sense of pride with how hard staff and children work and the wonderful relationships that are forged with parents over the years. This year has really been a testament to the amazing families and staff that I have the privilege of working with day in and day out. They have continued to support and nurture the children through Seesaw and Dojo, helping deliver work to those unable to work electronically and food to those who need extra support during this challenging climate.

Children have continued to work hard even during these extraordinary circumstances and staff have carried on working at school supporting key worker children and key year groups as they have slowly and safely returned.

Lifelines We have received overwhelming support from our local community following a request for help on social media. ‘Costcutter Triple A Foodhall’ have been supplying St. Anne’s families with essential supplies for free. Weekly collections of fruit, vegetables, milk, bread and eggs have been donated by the owners of the store. This, along with the support offered through the Holy Spirit MAC Foodbank has enabled us to provide a lifeline to families in need and to show that we are never far away when our help is needed. Coming together as a community has been so important over the past weeks, we cannot thank everyone enough for their generous donations.

Also, Father George has been in our thoughts and prayers over the past few months, school and the parish have kept in contact to enable us all to support our local community.

George Eliot Patient Gifts St. Anne’s staff have been giving back to their local community by supporting George Eliot Hospital’s Covid patients. A request was made for essential personal items for patients as their loved ones were unable to visit. St. Anne’s staff came to the rescue… alongside other families in the community we managed to deliver parcels of toothbrushes, toothpaste, razors, deodorant and face cloths and shower gel.

We miss you all. Continue to stay safe and look after each other and we look forward to seeing you all again soon.

SPIRIT

St. Anne’s took part in the Holy Spirit MAC online maths competition. The children were fantastic, they participated in daily questions for seven days. Overall, Year Three came fifth out of all the classes in the MAC and Mckenzie in year six came first out of three hundred and forty-five children who participated. Kaiden-Jay in Year Three came third and Darcie in Year Five was fifth. All that hard work in maths lessons is paying off. We are so proud!

Newsletter for The Holy Spirit Catholic MAC

Infectious smiles have been part of every photo and every Zoom meeting. Weekly telephone conversations have kept our St. Anne’s family together. I truly want to thank the parents for taking on the teaching role over the past few months and supporting the children as they work on the activities set by their teachers. There has been so much amazing learning across all the year groups. Families have called constantly for more work and work produced by the children has been of a high standard.

St Benedict’s Catholic Academy

Mrs Angela Sarjeant Principal

It is fair to say that despite the challenges presented by lockdown, there have been so many examples of how we have been able to enrich and strengthen the St Benedict’s family community. Whilst we always enjoyed close relationships with families at St. Benedict’s, this period of partial school closure has brought us so much closer as a community. As a staff we have loved the opportunity to speak regularly to parents on the phone and to hear all about how home learning is going and the many new experiences the children have had. We have also been delighted to support families who needed our help and we really enjoyed speaking to so many of you from the doorstep as we delivered Easter Sunday dinner and a Saturday Night Takeaway! These opportunities to work with colleagues across the Holy Spirit MAC to provide support to all MAC families in need have helped to forge strong relationships, both within and beyond our school community.

Needless to say, lockdown created a steep learning curve for staff and children alike. However, the challenge of getting to grips with new technologies has very much paid off. Staff and children have enjoyed virtual assemblies, lessons set on Google Classrooms… and of course not forgetting the videos we prepared for pure entertainment! We are now making plans to ensure we build on our effective use of technology to support the children’s learning when they return to school.

At St. Benedict’s we love to get competitive and lockdown has definitely provided plenty of opportunities to unleash our competitive spirit! All schools in the Holy Spirit MAC took part in an inter-schools online maths competition with 345 children from Reception to Year 7 competing to be crowned the MAC’s best mathematicians… this included a total of 33 classes battling it out to come top of the leader board! The children answered over 155,000 questions correctly in one week which was fantastic. Even more fantastic however was that Chad class took the winning title with a total average score of 714 points! A huge well done Chad!

Our talents don’t stop at maths! Children at St. Benedict’s also took part in the weekly virtual school games competition which included a range of activities: dance, cricket, tennis, basketball and athletics. We were so proud that St Benedict’s had the highest percentage of participation in North Warwickshire for the Cricket competition. Well done also to Omari Mullings in Year 2 who achieved the highest score in the North Warwickshire Schools (12th in County) for the cricket. Fantastic!

We are very proud of all the children who have been taking part, representing our school and keeping fit during lock down!

We couldn’t possibly have ensured that the children continued to learn and progress during this time if it wasn’t for the amazing support of our families. It has been fantastic to see some of the creative learning taking place and to hear of the new skills the children have developed in recent weeks. From home baking to STEM competitions, from planting to building houses for the Three Little Pigs… the list of amazing learning opportunities our families have supported is endless! We are also very proud of our key worker children who have been in school for the duration of lockdown. Their resilience and adaptability have astounded us.

Despite the challenges, there are so many positives we will carry with us into next year when we look forward to a return to normal school life at St. Benedict’s.

St Francis Catholic Academy

Mrs Charlotte Culleton Principal

There is a saying that every cloud has a silver lining. Covid 19 has cast a cloud over the world for months. Here at St Francis we have seen the dark cloud but also many silver linings.

One blessing we have all benefitted from is technology, we have all learnt how to use technology in wonderful social ways, to share lessons over ZOOM, to meet using micro soft teams, to video fun times and to sharing using Facebook. Our website has grown in an amazingly interactive way. As a MAC, technology has allowed us to share our funny videos and to feel united at the strangest of times.

Technology hasn’t just supported fun, Fr Michael has created a series of beautiful videos to nurture our school family over Holy Week, Easter, the Easter season and to reflect upon the sacraments. The parish of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and St Francis has experienced a global joining together in prayer with over 7,000 devices regularly joining us for Mass via the live webcam. It is astonishing to think of so many people joining our parish week after week as we celebrate Mass.

Parishioners, as always, have been active in praying for our school family and in giving generously to the MAC Just Giving page, remotely supporting the work of the MAC to ensure no family goes without food. The school has been fortunately placed to help parishioners in practical ways during this difficult time.

The brightest silver lining without a doubt has been sharing lockdown with the children who have attended school throughout. They now have a place in history, they have enabled their parents to go out to work, completing life changing and life affirming work. Each day whilst the town and roads were uncommonly quiet the children have arrived. Parents have been able to focus on their roles knowing their children are safe and enjoying a day at school. Not once during the whole of lockdown has a child moaned or complained, instead they have approached each day with a smile.

SPIRIT

Staff at school have shown tremendous resilience, care and compassion for our children and families. Staff agree whole heartedly it has been an absolute pleasure to have telephone conversations and doorstep visits with families. The way staff and children have missed each other is a real testament to the solid and meaningful relationships our school is built upon. As the school reopens to wider groups of children it is heart-warming to see staff and children reunited.

Newsletter for The Holy Spirit Catholic MAC

Families have been completing home learning with children. As the weeks have rolled by so many families have been thinking of inventive ways to help learning.

Parents have confessed to rediscovering their inner artist and to exercising more than ever by joining their children as they follow Joe Wicks. Parents have even spoken about reading on in the class book because they couldn’t wait for the next day’s instalment of The Far Away Tree! The photos of children working have been a joy to receive! Our school mascot Frank has challenged the children many times, to write a fictional ‘Best Lockdown Day Ever’ and to celebrate Ascension Day with an original piece of art work were two of the most popular challenges. Children were then delighted to receive a letter from Frank. Discovering the joy of a letter delivered by post has been a new and memorable experience for some.

The Holy Spirit Catholic Multi Academy

Life in Lockdown in Pictures