Newsletters

GHS Connect #6 Monday 12 October

From the Head

I hope that everyone had a good day on Friday. As we work through the final two weeks before half term, can I remind everyone to please ensure that appraisals are written up on to SIMS by Friday 16th October. You can find the ‘appraisal tree’ and other information in the ‘Appraisal’ area of the VLE.

As you know, I have been tied up with lots of Covid-related bureaucracy at times, so I’ve been unable to get out and about in the school as much as I would have liked. I am going to try to improve this. In the meantime, I have asked HODs and SLT to keep reminding me of all of the great things everyone is doing, and there are many! I’d like to ask everyone else to do this too, so please do drop me a line if you have something to share that we can all celebrate.

For starters today, a belated thank you to Sarah for her work on National Poetry Day and also to Hardeep, Gurvinder, Alan, Lucy and Saado for all of their work in ensuring that we passed an exams inspection with flying colours. A massive thank you is due to Shirley, Allison, Rav, Indy, Emmet, Haydar, Gurvinder, Amit, Buchi and Adam for all being instrumental in ensuring a very successful launch of the new-look Y11 Study Club. It's amazing that just a few weeks in, we have more than thirty of our key PP students attending every day, following a structured programme, ably supported by members of the SEN department, P16 student tutors, gap year tutors and others. A huge thank you to all involved and to any one who has helped in any way. This will make such a big difference to these students.

I also need to say a huge thank you to all of the KS3 team including the subject teachers for being so flexible and supportive whilst the i-Block was out of action. Everyone coped very well during those seven days and it was great that we could have Y7 & 8 students in school even when the building was out of action. A special thank you to the Y7 & 8 year teams and Dipesh, who managed the whole situation so calmly and efficiently.

And from Maths, a big thank you to Rachael for leading the dept in technology. Rachael has invested time in researching and using graphical tablets to help staff to continue with remote learning, and has led CPD for the team.

Please continue to send me through thank yous - they will feature in future editions.

You may have noticed that we are now asking all Post 16 students to wear face coverings in communal areas. We are monitoring the situation to see if we need to step this up with other year groups. You may also start to see more members of staff wearing face coverings too - this is not because we feel unsafe but rather to encourage the students that it can be normal to cover our faces in school at the moment, if we are happy to do so.

Have a lovely week everyone,

Mia

Learning and Teaching

Spotted!

A round up of some of the great learning and teaching strategies we’ve noticed being used around school recently…

> Kathy Charles keeping her year 10 girls active during netball drills to beat the autumnal weather!

> Harpal Sagoo explaining really clearly to students how their performance would be assessed in table tennis so students knew how to maximise their mark. 

And…

Harpal also gets a mention for creating a display which encourages students to take responsibility for their learning by reading around the subject:

L&T: Submitting work on Google Classroom

Now that most of the students are up and running with Google Classroom (and Lou, Carol and the Post-16 team are working hard to make sure any students with access issues are sorted out) it’s worth making absolutely sure that all students can actually submit work via Google Classroom, in case, at some point, they are required to self isolate. 

Can you set your next piece or work to be submitted electronically on Google Classroom?  Or, if that doesn’t work for your subject or the current SOW, follow Georgina’s tips in this super short video to make sure all our students are up to speed with ‘turning in’ online.  

Kelly McCarthy

Virtual Open Evening

Check our our Virtual Open Evening here - including Mia's presentation, interviews with our students and a tour of the school led by Emily and Myan in Year 9. 

The student interviews are particularly worth watching to highlight the brilliant job staff do every day to make our students feel welcomed, supported and motivated to aim high.

Inclusion & Pastoral

Thank you to everyone for the double whammy of PSHCE and Tutor time last week - I hope that the PSHCE sessions went well on Monday. I didn’t get round to seeing everyone this time, but those that I did see seemed to be going very well. And, I also hope that everyone appreciated the opportunity to see their tutees on Thursday afternoon. There was a lot to get through, so please don’t worry if you didn’t manage to cover all of it. Primarily, it was the time you got to spend with your tutor group that was most important, both for them and for you. Thank you to those of you who have emailed with issues that cropped up with your groups - if there are any concerns, please do let me know. As I have mentioned before in GHS Connect, I am looking at ways that we can build in more regular tutor slots with our groups, given the importance of looking after the pastoral care of our students.

Next PSHCE session on Monday 19 October

Our next PSHCE session is due on Monday 19th October, P5 - the resources are all on the system for this, so have a look at what you will be delivering (remember it’s the class you teach, not your tutor group) and if there are any questions or queries, talk to either me or Keely. Students in Years 7 - 11 should be bringing their PSHCE workbooks with them to the lesson… If all 1400 of them remember, I will be gobsmacked, but I will be putting out constant reminders, and Year Teams will have spares, if need be. We are also going to have to do some tweaking of the dates after half-term, due to option subjects who have mixed year classes - I will be looking at this this week and getting those new dates out by the end of the day on Friday so that people can plan ahead for after half-term.

Counselling and mentoring

I mentioned last week that we are building up both our counselling and mentoring provision - Cherish Bristow is going to start working with a group of Year 10 students this week, and we will be building in more capacity after half-term. I also met with the School Counselling Partnership on Tuesday - they are starting after half-term, will be in school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and will not only be working with our students, both through referrals and drop-ins, but offer an on-site service for staff too. At some point I will send out more information from SCP and introduce our new school counsellor to everyone. In the meantime, if you know of any students, either through your tutor session last week, in your classes, or in your day to day interaction with students, who you feel could benefit from either counselling or mentoring, please let the Year Teams know.

I hope everyone enjoyed the slightly longer weekend - 2 weeks to half-term!

Lou Grimley

Character strengths at GHS

While visiting form times on Thursday, we were lucky enough to walk into many interesting discussions between tutors and their tutees.

Linking to the metaphor of marathons, students were able to define Courage, Community and Responsibility but more importantly set them in the context of GHS. 

Thank you for completing the spreadsheet with ideas from your form on how we can show courage, community and responsibility at GHS. 

Here are a few examples from the spreadsheet:

> 7M2: Show courage by trying new things even if they are out of your comfort zone. 
> 8M3: Create community by making happiness everyone’s responsibility.
> 11M1: Show courage by challenging anti-social behaviour in and outside of school, especially if they are your friends. 
> 11T2: Take responsibility by tracking your progress.
> 12D: Show a sense of community by completing an act of generosity once per half-term. Take responsibility by not relying solely on textbooks but completing extra readings for your course.

See the images below to see this in action.

For the rest of October, we will be focusing on COURAGE: what it looks like in classrooms; what it looks like in the playground; and what it looks like outside of school. 

Noble and Andrea