From the Head
Welcome to the first edition of our new staff publication, GHS Connect! Thank you to Will Halsey and Jack Shepherd for working so hard to get this out to everyone. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.
At the start of my fourth full week, I wanted to thank everybody for such a wonderful, warm Greenford welcome. I’m sure that most of you are sick of hearing me tell the students and parents that ‘I know the school well’, but I have to say that this has certainly helped me to settle in. There are of course lots of things that I am still getting up to speed on and I’m very grateful for everyone’s support in this.
One of the benefits of coming back to Greenford is that I am well placed to come back in and see how things have changed. I can honestly say that uniform, lunchtimes and punctuality seem to have improved markedly over the last four years, and of course, teaching remains outstanding, staff are as professional and committed as ever and the students as lovely as they always were.
Over the last couple of weeks I have popped into quite a few lessons and I have been consistently impressed with the learning and teaching, the resourcing, the behaviour management and the positive relationships between students and staff. Thank you all for such a brilliant start to this academic year. Alongside teaching, there is of course so much more going on - we have already seen Years 9 and 10 visit Amersham for a field trip, Year 13 head off to Overstrand Hall in Norfolk and Year 12 are shortly to visit Watermans to see a German band perform! Thank you to Tracey, Jackie, Christine, Shirley, Stuart and Sarah who have been involved in these trips. Thank you to our pastoral staff who continue to go the extra mile to support some of our most vulnerable students, and to all of those staff who have given up their evenings to set the tone for the year through our Expectations Evenings. Thank you also to our support staff who are busy ensuring that all of the processes behind the scenes are watertight, setting up hundreds of students on SIMs, meeting and greeting our visitors and keeping us all organised!
It is great to be back working with such capable colleagues across the school. Have a fantastic week everyone!
Mia
Boys’ Achievement is an intervention designed to help underachieving boys through focused target-setting and monitoring. The Y11 students in my Boys’ Achievement tutor group (11M4) have been selected because of one or more of the following: having low or negative Progress 8; being at risk of not securing grade 5s in core subjects; disengagement with school; having low self-esteem and/or being behavioural concerns. 
Hopefully everybody will feel that getting to lessons and making a prompt start has improved since the beginning of this term. Please can we urge everyone to consistently apply 50 /50 ‘Meet and Greet’ / ‘End and Send’ and stand at the door, welcoming students into the lesson. Not only does it create a better corridor ‘presence’, it also helps students to make a prompt start to learning and allows for a quick ‘emotional check in’ with students.
