Newsletters

GHS Connect #26 Monday 25 April

From the Head

I hope you had a good, short week last week. Just one full week this week, and then another short one coming, due to the bank holiday. 

I thought that last week was a great start back. I managed to walk around and look into a range of lessons every day, and I saw consistency and focus throughout from students. Well done and thank you!

Thank you also for your work and commitment in supporting students with the Easter revision classes. The atmosphere in school seemed very positive with students calm and positive about what they were doing. Thank you also to the admin team for coming in to help.

We have had some more interest in our ex-students, leading to a magazine feature about cricketer Naomi Dattani, hopefully published soon, and also a hilarious (and lovely) short film about Bukayo Saka where various members of staff talk about their memories of him. The highlight had to be Rachael Fowler saying that he still owed her homework - for this, she has had the honour of featuring in the Daily Star, which did make me chuckle… At least we have appeared in a tabloid for a good reason!  You can also see the short film, starring Harpal, Rachael, Clare, Christabel, Dan and ex-staff member Bindu Joseph on YouTube here.  

Thank you so much to Harpal for organising these and thank you to all of the staff who were involved. 

Although these two ex-students are extreme examples of student success, it’s always good to have a reminder of why we do what we do.

Enjoy your week,

Mia

Monday
Normal day.

Tuesday
Meeting: Department time 3.15pm - 4.30pm.

Wednesday 
Meeting: Teaching/Pastoral Staff CPD 4 (Carousel) 3.15pm - 4.15pm.

Thursday
Normal day.

Friday
Normal day.

Learning and Teaching

Spotted!

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

• Peter Mather modelling on the visualiser to make outcomes explicit:

• Alistair Newall conducting a learner response lesson where students were given one of 3 different tasks depending on the errors made in a recent assessment: 

Learning and Teaching: GHS CPD Carousel 

This week sees the return of the GHS CPD carousel from 3.15-4.15pm on Wednesday. For those colleagues who haven’t taken part in this before, it’s like a mini teachmeet where teachers from across the school run short 15 minute sessions to share learning and teaching ideas and approaches. 

This year, we are focussing our sessions on the CPD groups that have run throughout the year. Volunteers from each group will be sharing the research that has inspired them, exploring the progress made in their own action research and offering their top tips. Colleagues will have the opportunity to visit two sessions and it is always a fantastic celebration of pedagogy. 

Further details for the logistics of this will be circulated via a staff announcement on Monday. 

Kelly McCarthy

Inclusion and Pastoral

I hope that everyone has had a lovely weekend after the return to normality…

I also hope that last week’s PSHCE lessons went well - please do look ahead to what is coming up and feel free to ask if there are any queries. I am getting some feedback from students about how they are finding PSHCE, so that we can continue to improve what we are doing moving forwards.

On the subject of feedback, if you could find 5 minutes to fill in the SMHW questionnaire that I sent out on Friday, that would be great - thank you to those of you who have already fed back. It’s really useful to get an idea of what is working, what needs tweaking and how people are finding it.

Lastly from me this week is an update on some of our more high profile students:

• Jasmine Rehal (11) - Jasmine should now be back full-time, and working towards all of her GCSEs, but there are still huge challenges outside of school. Ange has let key staff know.
• Katie Pitcher (11) - still on a reduced timetable and being very carefully monitored.
• Manprit Grover (9) and Shawna Butt (9) - we are waiting on the final details for EHCPs for both of these students which will bring some support and some funding;
• Judy Obetto (8) - has a meeting this week for a managed move to a local school. More details will follow after that meeting when we have a start date.
• Harry Mullery (7) - Harry will start his 1-1 tutoring this week which will take him out of lessons and he has a very modified timetable. The Year 7 Team will share details in due course. 

If anyone has any questions about the above, or other students who are not mentioned here but you would like more information on, or if you’d like to know a little bit more about all the interventions running, just ask!

Have a good week and let’s hope that sun keeps shining!

Lou 

Inclusion Heroes!

My Inclusion Hero this week is Jayne Ball for being an all round superstar, working with all of my external professionals who come in during the week, finding students and being unfailingly cheerful. Thank you! 

Character strengths at GHS

Have you seen our new Character Strength logo?

This half-term we will be focusing on Resilience. 

How can we encourage our students to build their resilience in the classroom? Charlotte Stace wrote a blog for Pearson exploring this Character Strength in February 2021. She states that resilience is “the key to making young people stronger and more assertive.”

She outlines five ways that we can equip our students with the tools needed to handle failure, disappointment and life’s challenges:

1. Promote positive emotions
2. Teach the importance of health and wellbeing
3. Encourage goal setting
4. Develop problem solving skills
5. Practise gratitude

You can read the full blogpost here if you are interested in learning more.

It was great to see so many of our new Character postcards going out on Friday. Do let us know if you need more!

Andrea and Noble