Newsletters

GHS Connect #35 Monday 28 June

From the Head

Not much to report from me this week, other than to say a big congratulations to Buchi Anyamah and Amit Pall who were appointed to the posts of Deputy Head of Year last week. We also appointed 3 Pastoral Support Workers who will join us in September, including two members of staff we already have with us - Hemal Odedra and Jesse Mantey. Our other Pastoral Support Worker is called Barbara and she will be joining us from Cardinal Wiseman in September. Well done to all.

Internal recruitment continues, and you can see a list of the remaining, current vacancies all in one place shortly on the VLE. You will notice a new role here and also the fact that some roles are temporary - this is because there are a few structural changes at SLT happening, which means we are altering some of the ways we do things. I will update staff on the changes to SLT in the next week or so.  We want to keep some posts temporary for now - this is not for financial reasons - it’s just so that we can revisit things next year, if priorities do happen to change again. This list of roles and opportunities is subject to change, and may well be updated, especially if and when others are recruited to new roles, leaving their existing roles vacant. Some other roles may also be advertised at the beginning of September.

All roles will be advertised on the VLE at some point this week. Bear with us as we get them all scheduled in - it’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, so you might not see all of them at once.

Have a lovely week,

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…
 
> Gulaid Gulaid using ‘No Hands Up’ questioning techniques and follow up questions to get students to elaborate on their answers. 

Staff Meeting Consultation

Thank you to everyone who responded to the staff consultation regarding the meeting calendar and staff CPD.  

The main findings…

> Many staff expressed positivity about the current system in terms of  having a strong, consistent routine so everyone knows when meeting time will be in advance.

> Colleagues saw department time as essential for subject specific CPD but felt that they would like more training on pastoral issues in school.

> The majority of staff who responded expressed that the current 2 hour meeting is too long. Various consequences of the length of the meeting were given, including: lack of productivity in the second half of the meeting and the following day; increased challenges with traffic and interruption of family routines; quality of planning for the next day affected.

> Staff expressed some concern that moving briefing to Monday morning might be particularly challenging, leading to the start of the week being rushed as colleagues set up for teaching. 

> Almost all colleagues strongly agreed that they would like CPD to be more tailored to an area of pedagogy they would like to work on and to the specific stage of their career. 

In light of this, we’ll be working on some changes to the meeting calendar and CPD delivery for next year. Please look out for communication around this in the coming weeks. 

Kelly McCarthy

Inclusion & Pastoral

Not too much from Inclusion and Pastoral this week as we enter the last bit of the academic year - I’ll be sending out a survey about behaviour at the start of the week, as the Behaviour Vision Group finalises plans for September in terms of both systems and key messages for the new academic year. If you could take 15 mins to fill it in at some point, that would be great. 

The other survey to mention is the Wellbeing Survey about what to do next Tuesday with our meeting time - I will announce the results from that very soon! Thank you to everyone who fed back on how they would like to spend their Wellbeing event…

My other thank you is to everyone who helped out and supported Chelsea's Choice on Wednesday afternoon - as I have said before, I know it’s a tough watch, but as always, it was brilliantly performed and Year 9 conducted themselves extremely well. It also gave me and our Safer Schools Officer, Stacey Hodgson, an opportunity to give some key safety messages to the year group, replicated with Year 10 on Friday morning. This week we will be giving the same messages to Year 7 and 8 - details of when those assemblies will take place will follow soon.

This week’s PSHCE will see the next RSE lesson - have a look at the resources and please do ask if there are any questions or concerns about what you are covering. There are a very small number of students whose families have asked that they be taken out of these sessions - I will scoop those students up on Friday. We will also be covering some CIAG work in a tutor session very soon, so watch this space!

The last thing from me is to let everyone know that we will be running a Summer School for a week in August using a company who organise and run the whole thing - there is, however, the opportunity for our own staff to be involved so I will be circulating details of when the summer school is and how you can get involved this week.

Have a good week, everyone - and remember to get in touch with Tash and Jo, our school counsellors, available on scp@greenford.ealing.sch.uk, if you feel the need.  

Lou Grimley

Bukayo Saka: Mediawatch!

You may have noticed some positive publicity for the school in the last week following our former student Bukayo Saka's man-of-the-match performance for England in the Euro 2020 game against the Czech Republic. As Bukayo's former PE teacher, Mark Harvey has been in demand as the BBC, Sky and even TV channels from around the world have been in contact.

This culminated in the BBC running a short interview with Bukayo during half-time in the Wales game on Saturday where his GCSE results and our Twitter account took centre stage:

If you've missed it, check out the following links:

Greenford on BBC 6pm News (scroll to 27.00), BBC Radio 5 Live (from 14.08), Sky Sports News and the BBC interview where Bukayo talks about his GCSEs is on YouTube here. In addition, Greenford students may also be appearing on CBBC Newsround this week. Let's hope Bukayo scores a couple against Germany in the next round - at which point Mark is going to need an agent!