Newsletters

GHS Connect #20 Monday 6 February

Mia's notes

Welcome back to the final week before half term. 

Thank you very much to everyone who supported Parents' Evening, with particular thanks to Andrea and the Year 10 team who planned everything and set everything up so well. It certainly seemed like another very successful evening.

I wanted to draw attention to the great work that is going on to address instances of bullying - thank you very much to the year teams who are tracking and noting any bullying incidents and also thank you to Jo Cole who is doing a wonderful job of planning and delivering the workshops. SLT presented this work to Governors at our strategic event on Monday and they were very pleased with all of the work that everyone is putting into this area. Lou mentioned in briefing that we would soon be introducing ‘respect workshops’; a similar idea to try to tackle some of the issues we are having with respect and classroom behaviour concerns - more info on this will follow but we hope to be up and running with this shortly after half term.

Finally, thank you to George and Tevin for taking the Boys’ Achievement group to Wembley last week, and Jamie, Tia and Hassnain who took deserving Year 10s on a bowling trip.

I hope everyone has a wonderful half term break.

Mia

The week ahead

Monday
Normal day.

Tuesday
Meeting: Department time 3.15pm - 4.30pm.
Equality Working Party.

Wednesday 
Briefing 8.15am.
No meetings after school.

Thursday
KS3 Interim deadline - Year 7, 8, 9 data due.

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...  

National Apprenticeship Week: form activities  

National Apprenticeship Week is 6-12 February.

Please take any opportunity you can find this week to discuss apprenticeships as a potential option for our students - whether that is in form time or lessons. The theme for this year is ‘Skills for Life’.

Some resources that might be useful in form time this week:

Look at the amazing set of Futures in 15 videos Hebe and Trish put together - they are all available on the Student VLE here: https://vle.greenford.ealing.sch.uk/page/?title=Futures+in+15&pid=268 (remember you'll need to be logged in to the VLE for the link to work).

This week, you may want to focus on Leah Virdee, a former Greenford student who went on to do an apprenticeship in a hair salon and who tells us all about apprenticeships before focusing on her role. It's on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrbpZUIW7qo 

Additional resources

The Amazing Apprenticeships website includes an introductory video about what apprenticeships are with lots of industry-specific content in addition. 

In particular, the Amazing Apprenticeship resources page is here. Filter the resources by films, games or classroom activities depending on what you’re looking for.

Thanks,

Will

Pupil Premium update: Year 11 revision

What do our year 11 PP students need?

Interim 2 suggested a significant gap in achievement between our PP and non-PP students. This was particularly prevalent between the girls in Year 11 across all subjects. I went to investigate and spoke to Chloe Altman who is our Girls Achievement lead in Year 10 and also manages Studio 11. Chloe talked about the “panic”, the “anxiety”, the skills of girls to “disguise” and “mask”: 

“They look like they’re working but actually it’s not purposeful”.

I then interviewed one of the PP girls in Year 11 who is currently on the path to achieving zero GCSEs above a level 3. She talked about the “stress” of exams, she acknowledged that she could “put in more hours revision” but also didn’t know anything the school could do differently to help her.

What I reflected on is how vulnerable some of our students are. It made me realise that we as their teachers are their greatest resource, the greatest levelers of their disadvantaged barriers - whatever these are. We are the only people in their lives who can help them to navigate the landscape of our academic subject. 

Therefore, in this, the final push, they need us to be clear about their revision tasks and they need us to start the revision process in class so that they feel confident to complete it independently. 

How?

1. Give students the physical resources to complete the revision task exactly as you require.
2. Set revision tasks at the start of a lesson.
3. Partially complete revision tasks together using the visualiser.
4. Add specific links on google classroom to online resources that they can use to complete the task effectively.

Please let me know if any PP student in year 11 needs resources to revise! Please let me know if you think tough love and straight talking or mentoring could help. Remember, we are PP students' greatest levelers of their disadvantage.

Jess

Bright Spots

This week’s bright spot is a double whammy for Hardeep Brar.

Richard Lewis has nominated Hardeep for her exceptional hard work. In his words: “The work you do at leading the many exam seasons within our school is quite remarkable. You always organise everything so thoroughly and deal with all scenarios with such characteristic calmness. You make life easier for so many members of staff; you help put our students at ease, and you ultimately prepare them in the perfect fashion. On our - and their - behalf, thank you!”

This was closely followed by Amandip Johal who said: “There have been so many internal exams – Y11 mocks, Y12 and Y13 and the second round of mocks coming up and Hardeep always arranges them so efficiently and calmly. Hardeep’s planning and organisation of the exams, both internal and external means that the students also always feel calm and this enables them to hopefully do their best.”  Thank you Hardeep!

Inclusion Heroes

I have two lots of Inclusion Heroes this week – firstly, I would like to say thank you to Gulaid Gulaid, Hibo Ahmed and Tevin Deola for conducting an excellent restorative meeting with a parent and student on Friday over a particularly unpleasant incident involving racial abuse. I know that it would not have been an easy meeting to navigate but thank you for taking the time to make it clear to the student involved why what was said was so deeply offensive and to help them understand how best to move forward.

My second IH is George Lanigan for sending us the resources that he had used to talk to his Boys’ Achievement group about Andrew Tate – George also talked to Reena and I about striking the right balance between creating a forum for discussion around Tate in a way that did not strengthen attachments to this man. Thank you, George!

Lou