Newsletters

GHS Connect #5 Monday 3 October

Mia's notes

Welcome back to a slightly different week, with open evening on Thursday and our INSET day on Friday.

A reminder that our INSET day will start at 8:45am in the hall and will involve a few short training sessions prior to time for appraisals. Anyone who is not part of the appraisal cycle or who only has one meeting will be directed by their HOD to work on specific things, likely to include planning and preparation.

Don’t forget that we have our Macmillan coffee morning on Friday 7th October which will take place during the break - around 11am. Please bake (or buy) something to donate if you are able, and bring some cash along to raise money for this excellent cause.

Thank you to everyone who met with Corinne Gill on Thursday. She was very complimentary about the school and about the huge amount of hard work that everyone so obviously puts into GHS. 

Thanks also to Tracey and Christine who have taken students out on a trip to the RGS, and also Trish, Sonia and Lydia who organised the trip to the Winston Churchill Theatre in Ruislip.  See Reena’s bright spot nomination below for more info. Well done, of course, to our own Cherish Bristow who was performing!

Finally, a massive well done and thank you to Andrea who spoke at the Pixl conference on Friday!  I was not there myself but I’ve heard incredible feedback about how brilliant she was!! Great job Andrea :)

I’m not in on Monday and Tuesday as I am on a course, but I will see everyone again on Wednesday.

Have a great week,

Mia

The week ahead

Monday
Normal day.

Tuesday
No meeting due to Open Evening.

Wednesday 
No meeting.

Thursday
PSHCE P1 - resources here.
Open Evening - students sent home at 1.20pm.
Department time / Open Evening preparation Thursday afternoon. 
Open Evening 5pm - 8pm. 

Friday
INSET day - details on this VLE announcement.

Notes
Year 12 Attitude to Learning grade data collection.

Learning and teaching: Spotted

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

Finola Doyle (right) focussed on literacy with her year 9 class, especially looking at tier 2 and 3 vocabulary that students struggled to understand. Highlighting key words/phrases and then annotating their meaning around the page allowed the students to access the overall text. 

Learning and teaching: learning objectives

Colleagues in the PE department are doing something interesting with learning objectives! By using the Know-Grow-Show model shown below, teachers are making clear the specific knowledge and skills needed to be successful in that lesson and are also placing emphasis on the character strengths that will contribute to achievement. This week perhaps consider how you are using the GHS character strengths to underpin your teaching. 

Kelly

Bright Spots

A nomination from Reena and two slightly different ‘bright spots’ to celebrate this week, both from people external to GHS.

Trisha Soneji, Lydia Hamblin and Sonia Yamoah - nominated by Reena Bharadva.

Trisha, Lydia and Sonia have been nominated for taking 24 Year 8 PP students to the theatre. As Reena pointed out, there was a huge amount of time and effort put into allowing this trip to happen, and of course, it’s great that so many PP students have benefited from the opportunity. Thank you for being so dedicated! 

Dan Siskin has been celebrated by a grateful Year 7 parent.

The parent took the time to write in and say: “I just wanted to thank Mr Siskin for his help with my daughter who had been upset with a comment made by another student. She came home so happy and felt truly listened to and supported so thank you so much for that. It means so much knowing she has the support of the school when she’s struggling.” Well done Dan!

Hemal Odedra has been celebrated by Karen Gibson at the Local Authority for his contribution to a recent meeting about the Mentors in Violence Prevention Programme. 

Karen said: “There is no way I could have got across what you did by explaining the work with your Year 10 & 11 boys – you really brought to life the reality and the benefits of the programme, both immediate, mid and longer term.” Well done Hemal!

If there is anyone you want to thank, celebrate or simply acknowledge for anything, big or small, keep the bright spots coming. I am keeping a list - if your nomination hasn’t featured yet, it will do!

Post 16 update

Thank you to all staff who have been so supportive of our Post 16 students – both the Y12s who are settling into Post 16 life & the Y13s who are embarking on the most important year of their academic lives. A speed update for you:

Year 12

• All students have a finalised timetable now. There should be no further movements between subjects or even within subjects. This will now only occur in exceptional circumstances and you will be involved in these discussions.
• All students have now selected a GHS Community Passport programme for the autumn term. They will be informed of their grouping next week & will begin their voluntary work on the week commencing 10th October. Community work will range from Greenford Guardians (breaktime duty) to library support, to lesson support, to extra curricular club support, to Pupil Premium Champions… and everything in between.  
• Y12 students have been encouraged to complete an EPQ this term (Extended Project Qualification). They may approach you about being a supervisor. Please listen to their pitch & consider if you can support (it is a commitment that goes a long way to supporting our students’ university applications) 
• Teachers of Y12 will be asked to put in an A2L interim this week (Thursday 6th October).

Year 13

• Assessment week is now complete. Please find a list of students that missed their exams here.
• Teachers can return scripts as and when they are marked. Please use this as launchpad to both guide learners in responding to feedback but also as a form of motivation (the last thing we want is for our students to become disillusioned so early in the year and throw the proverbial towel in).
• Teachers of Y13 will be asked to complete interims by the end of this half term (Friday 21st October); you will be asked for a UCAS grade entry (further guidance to follow).
• Can I please ask all teachers of Y13s to complete their teacher references for their students. The Google Sheet can be found here and there is a UCAS teacher reference guidance document here.

Richard

Mental health: The Charlie Waller Trust

The Trust was created by the Waller family in 1997 in response to the loss of their son and brother Charlie to suicide having suffered from depression. They have since become one of the UK’s most respected mental health charities. Their overarching mission is to educate young people and those with responsibility for them, about their mental health and wellbeing. Charlie Waller therefore have developed a “5 ways to wellbeing” campaign, to support a healthier mind set. See the image below for more.

For anyone interested in learning more about mental health and wellbeing, Eventbrite offer some great webinars, free of charge, and even if your not able to attend, by registering they will send you the recordings of the talks.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/d/online/mental-health/

Niloo

Pastoral and inclusion: CPOMS

As always, it is very busy in Inclusion and Pastoral… A slightly shorter week (in terms of students at least) will be very welcome.

This week I will be contacting people about CPOMS - this is a safeguarding database on which we are going to start recording our safeguarding concerns. This will be done VERY slowly and will involve a number of steps, the first of which is getting you all signed on. All I need you to do this week is set up a CPOMS account when you get an email asking you to do this. And, then make a note of your login details! More information will then follow on Friday morning…

Secondly, it’s PSHCE this week, the third lesson of the year! Look at the resources and get yourselves ready… If there are any questions, please feel free to talk to me or Reena about it. Please see below for some examples of brilliant work that has been going on in PSHCE around the school.

Lastly, PLEASE READ THE CP TRAINING AND KCSIE, if you haven’t already done so. Everything you need is on this link.

That’s it - have a good week, everyone!

Lou

Inclusion Heroes!

This week’s Inclusion Heroes all come from our last PSHCE lesson where there were examples of excellent PSHCEing - drum roll please…

Anneka Mehta was making the students stand and do the ‘fake laugh’. Year 11s were quite reluctant to do this, but nevertheless, they did get there!

Jonathan Edmondson (below left) was using his ipevo with his form and they were going through the booklet together.

Kiran Thandi's Year 10s had just come from assembly and she told them she was so excited to have a brand new booklet! She managed Darius really well!

Daniel Kloss was really motivating Year 11s and talking about stress.

Belen (below right) was doing a great job leading a class discussion about wellbeing.

There will be more shout-outs to follow - I couldn’t fit them all in!