Newsletters

GHS Connect #18 Monday 1 February

From the Head

Last week we heard that we may be starting to have students back in from 8th March. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I have learnt to not overthink or put too much faith in government announcements - best to wait to see how reality actually pans out! Whatever happens, we can be secure in the knowledge that we are delivering an education that is as good as it can be in the circumstances, and which we will adapt as and when we need to.

Last week, we also had some rather more depressing and difficult news to deal with, when we discovered that one of our quite recent, former students has been convicted of serious sexual offences. Many staff, including myself, have taken this very hard and have struggled to understand how someone who seemed to have so much going for him, has ended up committing such awful offences.The fact is, of course, that we can’t guarantee that all of our students will end up following the path that we would choose for them - as much as we do, there will always be some who choose a different route, in some cases, like this one, with extreme consequences.  I want to say a really massive thank you to Angela Thomas and Sally Ramsdale who have been absolutely amazing in picking up some student fallout from this; contacting many students, both current and past, and offering support during what, I know, will have been very difficult conversations. It goes without saying, of course, that you should please avoid commenting on social media and / or discussing this in detail with students. If you do happen to get any concerns from students or parents, please refer them onto myself or Lou.

This week, I also want to celebrate our pastoral staff in general, who have all been fantastic in keeping in touch with our students. I decided to try to count up the number of students who have been called this week on the Super Spreadsheet and gave up when I got to 300! Along with great teaching, this is the cornerstone of our work - checking that our students are doing okay and helping them with any problems. Thank you to our amazing year teams and also our Learning Support department who are doing so much in this area.

Final celebration this week to Steven Bold, who has taken on Lead for KS3 RE, while Trish steps up and becomes Acting Head of RE, during Reena’s maternity leave. Well done Steven!

And lastly, Sarah Williams has asked me to remind everyone about the need for donations to the foodbank. As Sarah points out, in recent times it has no longer been practical or possible to collect actual physical donations, though many people in our community continue to depend on food banks to get through the week.  

If you would still like to support Ealing Food Bank, it is possible to make one-off or regular monthly donations, via this link: https://ealing.foodbank.org.uk/give-help/donate-money/

It takes 2 clicks, it's incredibly easy, and will take less than 2 minutes.

Any donation, no matter how small, helps, (and if just half of the 200 GHS staff donated £1 per month, that would be £100 each month).

Have a lovely week,

Mia

VLE quicklinks

In response to feedback that videos, links and resources aren't always easy to find on the VLE with so much added recently, I've tried to reorganise things a little to make it more user-friendly. To briefly summarise:

> The remote learning and teaching hub is here

> A new Pastoral remote learning hub is here with details of live tutor times etc.

> A link to video assemblies is now on the homepage

> How-to videos from the Learning and Teaching team are now all collated on a dedicated L&T Videos page.

VLE links login

One frustrating aspect to the VLE is that when you first visit a VLE page it will use your login details to find out if you're a staff member or student and re-direct you to the correct homepage. Unfortunately, the downside to this system is that if you've clicked on a link in an email then it takes you to the homepage rather than the link you were expecting. However, the VLE will then remember you for 90 minutes (the maximum time allowed due to security settings) so if you click on email links after you've logged in they should work as expected.

Please do keep feeding back on the VLE - in lockdown we become much more reliant on websites and technology and any suggestions or requests are extremely helpful. 

Will Halsey

Learning and Teaching

Spotted!

Thank you to everyone for the energy and enthusiasm with which you have approached this next round of online learning.  The response has been so positive that it’s impossible to pick out everyone, but here are a few we’ve heard about on the grapevine...
 
> Aaron McDonald going above and beyond with his pre-recorded and live lessons in PE.

> Angela Thomas supporting the students' remote learning in GHS mini school by walking them through their recorded lessons and work.  

> Sima Bhudia creating recordings for KS3 DT which colleagues across the team are adapting and using for their own classes. 

> Peter Mather giving Sociology students detailed feedback on their essays to help them make progress. 

> Trisha Soneji and Jo Cole delivering a first class training session to the NQTs. 

Learning and Teaching: AfL and Remote Teaching

When teaching remotely it can be difficult to implement the same AfL strategies we routinely use in the classroom and yet it’s even more important to know what knowledge our students have absorbed and how they have progressed in order to plan our next remote lessons. 

This week, in this 5 minute video, Andrea Hetherington talks us through her top 5 key AfL strategies she uses when teaching online. 

You can find our previous remote learning top tips and how-to videos on the VLE on the L&T videos page.

T&L Guide

A Reminder! If you are trying to figure out how to get something to work for remote teaching, make the GHS Remote Teaching and Learning Guide your first port of call. Hopefully you’ll find what you need and  this will save you time and energy.  If there’s any guidance you’d like to see included, please do let us know!

Shout outs!

Thanks to everyone who sent in a shout-out. If you'd like to send one in for a future board, write a post-it note, take a photo and add it to the folder: Staff shout outs 

A plea from me: Please, try to trim the photo so only the post-it can be seen (it saves me so much time!) and do not send them over email. Thank you!

Clare Secombe 

Behaviour for Learning

Each week in Connect, Mark and Jo will be sharing behaviour for learning tips designed to help manage behaviour in the unusual circumstances of Covid-19.

Behaviour for Learning tip #8: Routines

During this time of change and uncertainty, schedules and routines are especially important. Many of our students don’t have the structure and routines at home that we can provide in school which makes remote learning particularly challenging for them. 

This week, we have made year group timetables available on the school website to try to support parents so that they know what lessons their child has and when. It is therefore important that we try to provide as much structure and predictability as possible for our students.

Some ideas for structure and routines for remote teaching and learning:

> Put a visual schedule on your Google Classroom so that students feel prepared for each week.

> Have a live learning timetable for each class which stays the same each week.

> Let students know in advance if they need to bring any materials to their live lesson.

> Review your schedule during live lessons so students are clear what to expect. Share what’s coming up in terms of the learning.

> Having a schedule that’s easy to follow is also helpful for parents who are able to support and monitor their children’s learning at home. 

All of these examples help our students know what to expect each week to help them get into a home-learning rhythm in your subject. If you have any other ideas, please share them with us!

Mark and Jo

Inclusion & Pastoral

I hope everyone is still feeling ok, after a month of lockdown and a tough week in some senses. 

Thank you for the feedback to your Year Teams on how tutor time is going and the levels of engagement - up to this point, we have not been vigilantly chasing those who don’t attend, but now that they have had two weeks to get used to the new arrangement, please do let us know if there are students who are not turning up. As I mentioned last week, there is an Attendance to Form column on the Online Learning Trackers, so let us know on there. And, this week it’s my assembly that will pivot around Children’s Mental Health Week, as will Virtual Tutor. If you could mention it in your slots too, that would be fab - here’s the Children's Mental Health Week website that will tell you a little bit more about it.

In addition to the usual pastoral stuff, it’s also PSHCE this week, on Friday P1 - Keely will send round some more details on this, but this is just to remind you. And, given what Mia had to announce on the VLE on Friday, the importance of this work that we do outside of our subject based curriculum has never been so resonant. On that topic, our draft RSE Policy was posted on our website at the start of the week so that our parents and carers are aware of what we are planning to cover in this area, later in this academic year. We have also booked in some training with the Health Improvement Team at the borough to train up staff to deliver these sessions, so please watch this space - if anyone is concerned about either the subject of RSE or what has come out in the news this week, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me. 

On a more positive note, I am nearly done on the laptop front… The last group to be allocated their laptops are the non-PP Year 7s which will be early this week - yay! I will then look at the sibling groups, as with 3 teenagers at home I am acutely aware of what device wars can be like. A big thank you to all staff for sending through names and concerns - keep these coming and keep noting things on the tracker, as issues will continue to crop up and we will keep plugging those gaps. 

I met with Jo Morgan this week, our school counsellor - as always, she wanted to remind everyone that she is there if you need her, and that you are welcome to email her directly on jmorgan111.307@lgflmail.org.

Enjoy the penultimate week of the half-term and keep promoting Children’s Mental Health Week!

Lou Grimley

Character strengths at GHS

Did you know that Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week runs from 1st – 7th February? This year, the week is themed around the different ways we can express ourselves. 

Do our students have the courage to express themselves?

Place2Be  has created free resources to help students explore what it means to ‘Express Yourself’. 

We have included two resources from the website (see right and below) that you could use with your forms. Perhaps they can find the courage to express themselves or feel part of the community with the prompts on the ‘Connect with others’ poster.

Noble and Andrea