Newsletters

GHS Connect #24 Monday 30 March

From the Head

It was a bit strange last week. I felt as if I was running a ‘ghost school’ with so few staff and students here. I want to thank our wonderful TAs: Maryam, Saado, Edil, Holly, Hemal and also Steve Wilson and Sammy Ebzao who were all here at some point last week and also our great support staff team who came in last week and are in this week on rotation. Thank you also to the Mitie team who are opening up each day and looking after us all so well.

I hope that everyone is starting to adapt to the ‘new normal’ of remote learning this week but has also had some time to recharge and reset. These are strange times but they are also allowing for a little headspace in our usually busy lives. 

We had just 2 or 3 students in for most of last week but we are expecting that to potentially increase after Easter and I will be in touch soon about how we might manage that on a rota system going forwards. I have informed the Local Authority that we will not be opening over Easter as we are having substantial engineering works on site to (hopefully) fix our long term heating issues. There is a survey from the LA asking teachers to be volunteers in other schools which I posted on the VLE on Friday, which you are welcome to complete if you are interested.

There have been some positives in all of this craziness: parents I have spoken to have all said that the online working is going well at home, the students that we have here are enjoying themselves and having fun and one student’s mum phoned me on Friday to say that although her son could no longer attend, he was so upset that he cried!

Stay safe everyone and keep in contact with one another.

Mia

Remote Learning and Teaching update

Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone for all the remote teaching and learning that has been taking place this week. It’s absolutely amazing that we have this (more or less) up and running within a week.

You may well have work coming back in from students by now. If there are any issues with submission you can email the following colleagues who are able to send a text message home to remind students/parents to complete their work:

KS3: Sarah Packman
KS4: Jayne Ball
KS5: Carol Savoury

As it isn’t possible to drop in and ‘spot’  great practice at the moment, please remember to send me an email  with a few lines about any successes you or other colleagues are having with distance learning.  To kick this off, we have a big shout out to Virginie Oulidi and Cimi Hysenaj who have been taking things a step further than Google Classroom and experimenting with teaching ‘live’ lessons using Zoom and Jess Humphries and Jen Williams who have been using the IPEVO to pre-record mini lessons.

Over the coming days, HODs will be discussing plans for how we carry on with distance learning after the Easter holidays and we’ll be sharing some further guides on how to use different programmes (in addition to our staples GCSEPOd and Google Classroom) to develop our ability to teach remotely...watch this space!

Kelly McCarthy

Safeguarding 

Safeguarding concerns

If you have any safeguarding concerns that emerge due to remote learning or email contact with students make sure you report them in the usual way to our Child Protection team. Please email childprotection@greenford.ealing.sch.uk with details of your concern.