Message from the Principal

Monday, May 4, 2020

Dear families,

I hope that you are all well and coping as well as you can. I wanted to write to you to outline how we are looking to develop our provision for students across the remainder of this half-term.

Firstly though I would like to thank you and your children once again. As a staff, we continue to be impressed by the dedication and quality of work from most of the young people whilst they are at home. It is obviously a difficult scenario for everyone but the vast majority seem to be coping very well and engaging effectively with the work set. This could not have been possible without the hard work and effort of all of our staff, who continue to go above and beyond to support young people and their families. My ongoing thanks go to them for this.

Last week, some staff trialled the use of ‘live’ lessons with some teaching groups. This is something that we are going to expand this week, beginning with Year 10, so that each group have at least one live lesson for each subject. If a teacher does not have a Year 10 group, then they will use a group from another year. There is no set definition of a live lesson but staff will work to try at least one of the following options:

Staff may record some voice-overs for PowerPoint presentations so that they are able to explain some of the more difficult concepts in the lesson, just as they would in the classroom/learning space.
 

Using Google Classroom’s ‘Meets’ function, to see the students as if you would on Zoom/Teams/Whatsapp video call. This is safe and secure and very easy to navigate as it is all through our single sign on the student portal. You can turn your video off if for any reason you don’t want to be seen! I taught a Year 7 geography lesson on there for an hour on Tuesday and it was great to see and interact with the students.
 

Some staff have signed on to Google Meet for the second half of the lesson, to enable students to ask any questions that they have about the content.
 

Some may do a combination of 1 & 3
 

If this further trial continues to be successful next week, then we will look to expand this across other year groups. Thanks to those families who have already taken the time to feedback on the live lessons from last week, it is much appreciated and helps us shape our offer for the students.

A couple of things to be aware of that will help the live lesson be more successful:

Staff will advertise which of their lessons this week will be live – please ask students to look out for this and make sure they are online at this time
 

If you do not currently have Google Chrome, then please download it as they will need it to access Google Classroom Meets.
 

Students should go through the school’s ‘student portal’ to access Google Classroom, rather than the Google Classroom app, as this is more successful.
 

If students have access to a laptop/PC rather than a mobile pheon, this tends to be easier for them to access Meets.
 

A reminder that if your child is struggling with the current situation then please do get in contact by emailing their Learning Manager. We are currently supporting students and families and are more than happy to do the same for more if needed. A reminder, also, that there are many resources available on the safeguarding page of the school website. Staff have also been phoning each household and by the end of this week we should have contacted all students to see how they are.

Best wishes for the next few weeks and please do let us know if there is anything that we can do to help or support in any way.

Take care

Gregg Morrison

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