Newsletters

GHS Connect #21 Monday 28 February

From the Head

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. At least the weather was much improved! It’s incredible to think that we have only 4 ½ weeks to go until Easter and then we will be into the Summer term. I always think that once the Autumn term is out of the way, time really flies in schools.

Although we are only halfway through the year, this is the time that we begin to plan ahead for the priorities for next year, and reflect on what needs improving, as we set the new school budget. This, along with our need for a succession plan for the future, is likely to mean some further changes to the SLT structure, and some possible new roles for both teaching and support staff. More info on this will follow.  

We are also looking at some of our work around behaviour, communication and parental engagement, which we know could be better, and will be consulting Heads of Year on how to continue to increase pastoral capacity. We are also going to start to consider how best to improve staff briefing, which we know is not ideal at the moment, as so many key staff are out on duty. We will be seeking your views on this.

Thank you to Fuad who is holding a coffee morning on Tuesday for some of our parents. It has been such a long time since we have been able to hold events like these, and it is great to be able to begin to do so once again. Thank you to everyone who will be involved in World Book Day - it’s always such a wonderful event. Thank you especially to Sarah Williams, Madeline and Elaine who are doing so much for this. Unfortunately, I will be out at the Ealing Headteacher’s conference on Thursday so I will not be able to be involved, but I look forward to seeing all of the photos!

Have a wonderful week,

Mia

Monday
Normal day.

Tuesday
Meeting: Department time 3.15pm - 4.30pm.

Wednesday 
Wednesday New Staff (ECTs and Teach First) CPD - Pupil Premium: Effective Teaching and Learning Strategies and SEND (HUM / SEO)

Thursday
KS5 Interim deadline.

Friday
Normal day.

Notes
KS4 mock exams.
KS5 Interims due - details on VLE: https://vle.greenford.ealing.sch.uk/news/?pid=10&nid=4&storyid=2489  (note - need to be logged in to VLE for link to work)

Learning and Teaching

Spotted!

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

• Belen Sanchez Carrasco using whiteboards with her year 7 class to check students' understanding of the task, a great way to incorporate Afl in her lesson. Remember students have these whiteboards at the back of their student planners.

• Rupinder Chana (below) circulating and providing feedback to students to help them improve the quality of their writing. She carries a whiteboard pen and writes on the students’ tables to help them remember the feedback - keywords they need to add or spellings that need correcting. This then provides the student with a bridge to improving their work independently. 

• Don Smith (right) making excellent use of RIP (Reprimand in Private). By bringing his student outside for a chat, he was able to correct their behaviour quickly and get them back into the classroom.

• Megan Wickens developing a new skill with her class. The learning journey, from definition to model examples to practice was clear in her students’ books. As they were practising,  she circulated and worked with small groups of students to check and help bridge to the task (below).

Learning and Teaching: Getting students to take responsibility for their own improvement

Many of us will now be on the home straight with our exam classes and during this period in the year many teachers are giving rapid and frequent feedback. 

Some students are able to take this on and improve subsequent pieces of work as a result, others, frustratingly, find it hard to apply and continue to make the same mistakes. 

At the weekend I was reminded of this tip on Twitter to encourage students to take the responsibility (this term’s character strength!) for improving the quality of their responses:

I’m going to try this with my year 13 students this week to see if it moves some ‘stuck’ students up a few marks as they try to demonstrate how they have met the success criteria. 

Kelly McCarthy

Inclusion and Pastoral

I hope everyone is ok after the first week back and with everything that is happening in Ukraine - what a sad week it has been. 

On that subject, Heads of Year will be keeping an eye on students who may be more affected by what is going on, as we would always do when world events may have more of a direct impact on members of our community. If anyone needs any further guidance on this, or is worried about any of our students, please talk to me or the Year Teams. There is some useful advice in how to approach issues in the guidance released by the DofE during half-term on Political impartiality in schools, which can be found here. 

A few members of staff have asked about students coming in and out of lessons, so I thought some clarification about the regular routine of external visitors might be helpful:

Monday - Scott Osborne, our Behaviour Consultant
Tuesday - Scott Osborne, Hana, our Clinical Psychologist, and Jo and Tash, 2 of our counsellors
Wednesday - Jo, Tash, Diane for counselling and Andy Naslund for mentoring
Thursday - Diane and Andy
Friday - Angela our counsellor

We also have students being mentored by the PSWs, but staff will always be informed about this and students should not just be taking themselves off to BG10. In addition to this, we also have Educational Psychologists and Speech and Language Therapists who visit on a regular basis.

And, lastly from me, please make sure that all incidents and initiatives are being recorded on SIMs and that when they are, intials are being used rather than names and that language is factual rather than emotive.

Have a good week!

Lou 

Inclusion Heroes!

This week’s thank you goes to Elaine Grundy and Madeline Secombe for being so brilliant in helping with the reading tests and PSHCE while Keely has been off. Lots of extra work has gone on behind the scenes which has been incredibly helpful!