May 2016

Dear Parents and Carers,

And… We’re Off!

We are well and truly into the GCSE and A-Level examination season now! It is very, very hard to gauge things at this stage but we have been pleased by the reaction of most students to the papers so far. This suggests that the students are, as we had hoped and planned, better prepared and more confident than ever before. We wish them every possible bit of luck and hope that the results they see on the 18th or 25th August enable them to move on to the next stage of their life with optimism and excitement.

Some Staffing News

On Monday 16th May 2016, Mrs Pavey and Miss Tucker visited Buckingham Palace to be honoured and thanked for the School’s involvement with the hugely successful Duke of Edinburgh Award. If meeting the Duke of Edinburgh himself was not enough, Mrs Pavey and Miss Tucker were also presented with a certificate by Nick Hewer from The Apprentice and Countdown. We were delighted to be invited and particularly so because Mrs Pavey will be retiring from Colmers at the end of this academic year. After 12 years at Colmers Mrs Pavey will be enjoying her (very) early retirement and will do so in the knowledge that on many, many different levels she has transformed this school and also the lives of so many individual children. Deputy Heads do many things, usually seen but often unseen, and as I contemplate Colmers without Mrs Pavey it will be those things she has done each and every day to make the lives of young people, colleagues and families better that I shall miss the most!

I know that many students and their families will also be very sorry to hear that Miss Whipp has begun early retirement on ill-health grounds. Generations of Sports Leaders will greatly miss her infectious enthusiasm and love of sports. Mrs Clarkson has also decided to be a full time mum and will not be returning to us, as hoped, in September. I shall provide the normal summary of end-of-year farewells and welcomes to new staff in the final addition of this newsletter, in July.

Colmers Is Never Really Closed…

Over the half-term, the school is not really closed and is open for a range of GCSE booster classes and smaller A-Level drop-ins. In addition, teachers have created superb revision activities and resources that have already been distributed or made available to your children in person or through our Portal. The final addition of the Year 11 GAP booklet is also in your children’s hands and is on-line. Below are some thoughts, reflections and advice to ensure that each student has every chance of success in the coming weeks.

Finally, we are looking forward to greeting our new Year 7 students at the end of June for their induction days. We know how much they are looking forward to coming to the school and this cannot be better shown than to provide you with some Plasticine work done by a Year 6 student who is very excited about joining our school community.

Best wishes, Mr Barry Doherty (Headteacher)

ACHIEVING EXCELLENCE

Workin’ Nine to Five – But Are They? The game is not up yet. As I type we are barely 20% of the way through the examinations and there is everything to play for amongst our students. The GCSE Mathematics examinations come along later than others which gives all of our Year 11s the opportunity to practise, practise and practise. The Whitsun Half Term is nine days long and contains a total of 216 hours – approximately one third of those, or 72 hours, ought to be devoted to revision. That’s about eight hours per day, a 9 till 5 investment in their future. If you have a son or daughter in Years 11, 12 and 13 that is not revising at least 4 or 5 hours each day during half term, then there’s a problem. Please talk to us to try and help solve that problem without delay!

Achieving Excellence by Belonging Together and Challenging Mind-sets

Headteacher’s Half Term Newsletter

Good Luck Years 11, 12 and 13!

Advice – to Parents and Carers You will know your children best and can spot when what looks like lazy avoidance is in fact stress and some anxiety. Remember, a healthy mind and outlook depends on a healthy-body that eats good food, drinks plenty of tap water and gets at least seven hours sleep. Often, a student struggles because one of those basic needs is not met and parents and carers are perfectly placed to do something about that!

Colmers has tried to remove the traditional problem of students not knowing where to start with their revision and so they should be able to just sit down and ‘get on with it’. Well, they should be able to - but sometimes after a good diet and clear revision schedule a student can still struggle with the scale of their task – as though they have to climb a vertical cliff without ropes! Reassure them that fears and anxieties are perfectly normal - in fact a little bit of anxiety can be good for them.

Also, reassure them that success and failure in their GCSEs or A-Levels will not guarantee or ruin their life-plans. A little perspective is needed, combined with some old-fashioned grit, determination, ambition and self-belief. BELONGING TOGETHER

Sponsored African Dancing – Raising Money for Water Aid On Wednesday 18th May, Year 7 tutor groups took time out from their normal Learning 4 Life (L4L) lessons and gathered as a Year group to take part in a huge sponsored dance event. In their L4L lessons running up to this, pupils have learned about the problems people are still experiencing in Sierra Leone in the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak. Pupils prepared for the sponsored dance by crafting beautiful African masks and collecting sponsorship money from family, neighbours and friends.

Our incredible Year 11 Dance Leaders (see right) gave up their own time to teach each Year 7 Tutor Group a dance-routine to perform on the

day. The Year 7 members of the School Council selected Water Aid as the charity to be supported in this fundraising event. With the expertise of Miss Tucker and our Year 11 Dance Leaders, the afternoon was a great success with Year 7 performing their African dance twice, with many Mexican Waves between! Well done Year 7!

Uniform Updates – PE Tops

The introduction of the new House system continues to change the way we think and approach competitions and activities at the school. You will be aware of the new Personal Scorecard and the use of House Points during this academic year. Our forthcoming Sports Day (Friday 15th July) will witness teams from each House competing in each of the events. House Assemblies will continue to foster students’ sense of belonging to both Colmers and their House: Dolphin, Eagle or Wolf. From September the new students into Year 7 will be required to wear a brand new sports-top. They all share the same basic design and fabric, but they will have strips of colours down each side - according to the House that the students belongs: Dolphins are sky-blue, Eagles are gold and Wolves are crimson.

Students in the new Years 8 to 11 (current Years 7 to 10) will not be required to wear the new top. However, the old PE tops will no longer be sold and therefore when your son or daughter needs to replace their sports top, he or she will be required to purchase the new version. We have thought long and hard about how we convert our uniform and feel that this approach will take time to be consistent across the school, but we did not want to place additional costs on families. Each top will cost as little as £13.00.

It is probably a good idea, at this point, to remind you that a detailed breakdown of our uniform and equipment expectations is available on-line - or a paper copy can be sent to you if you wish. The school continues to offer a fund to families struggling to pay for their children’s uniform. This support can be confidentially and easily given by emailing or calling me, Mrs Wilcox or your son or daughter’s Head of Learning & Achievement.

Achieving Excellence by Belonging Together and Challenging Mind-sets

Headteacher’s Half Term Newsletter

Colmers’ Poet Laureate – Spoz Leads a Poetry Workshop

On Monday 16th May, Spoz kindly agreed to return to Colmers to run a poetry workshop. The workshop was aimed specifically at Year 10 boys - they wouldn’t

mind me saying that before the workshop they did not own too many poetry anthologies and that they enjoyed other conduits for artistic expression. Spoz was fantastic and pitched the workshop perfectly to engage the students. He read some of his own poems which made everyone laugh. The students were shocked to hear that Eminem was a poet and that basically that was all rapping was! The students then got involved writing their own raps and performing them in front of the rest of the group. At the end they all said they had a great time and had changed their view of poetry. Spoz was wonderful and the pupils were amazing. My thanks to Ms Hanlon and Mrs Read for organising the successful event.

Poland Remembered – Reflections Exhibition on Tuesday 10th May 2016

Students, family, friends and colleagues belatedly met together to hear, see and read the reflections of the students and staff following the recent visit to Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Oscar Schindler Museum, the Galicia Museium and the Salt Mines. Each traveller created something very personal and unique that expressed something of where minds journeyed during the time in Poland itself and in the days and weeks afterwards.

We are exploring ways to publically display their work and hope to have something in place for September. The display will also feature reflections from the students who took part in last year’s visit to the battlefields of the First World War.

Now that the visit is over and we can look back on a really successful visit that truly affected the hearts and minds of all who went, I wish to thank Mrs Hewston. She has organised the visit and all related activities from start to finish – supported by Mr Charlett. She has done so with incredibly meticulous planning and a clear vision of what she wanted the Colmers community to gain from the experience. Mrs Hewston has built on Mrs Hodgson’s visit to Belgium and France last year and begs the question, “…Where are we going to go next year?” Watch this space…

CHALLENGING MIND-SETS

Stuck at BASE Camp – Why do we find things so difficult sometimes?

The recent appointments of Mrs Finch and Mrs Wilcox are part of a developing strategy around inclusion at Colmers. By inclusion I mean the way we try to make sure that this school is designed to ‘fit’ every child. Not just a one-size-fits-all school that suits most kids but one that is a place for all. At the heart of our strategy is ensuring that your sons and daughters experience good or better teaching and tutoring every single minute of every single day. This is a massive goal for any school and is almost as hard as achieving the goal of being a good parent every second of every day!

Our pursuit of inclusive classrooms has already led to enormous levels of work and commitment from teachers, in particular, to design lessons and learning that is exciting, engaging and targeted at individual students and not a one-size-fits-all approach.

But sometimes a child needs more than a good teacher and a good tutor. Sometimes, those things can be in place and a child is still struggling. When a child is struggling, it might be typically observed in a number of ways:

Disappointing working-at grades

Concerns around the likelihood of them hitting their target grades

Poor attendance and punctuality

Disruptive behaviour in school and / or within the local community

Unexplained changes in a child’s mood / behaviour / thinking

Achieving Excellence by Belonging Together and Challenging Mind-sets

Headteacher’s Half Term Newsletter

Traditionally, British society and British schools have wrongly labelled these struggles. Old-fashioned thinking led many of us, when we were at school, to believe that intelligence was fixed. We know this is not true and that is why our school motto is to challenge our mind-sets.

There still remains an old-fashioned tendency to believe that poor attendance and punctuality is a reflection of poor parenting and that such children lack commitment or grit. Whilst this can be true, there are often more complex reasons that require more compassion and less criticism.

Even behaviour has been completely misunderstood. Poor behaviour is merely a by-product / effect / consequence / manifestation of something that is not quite right in a child’s life. A child can misbehave for all sorts of reasons. Often and usually it’s because he or she forgets that others have a right to be treated fairly and with respect. Most of the time a simple telling-off or a detention, for example, is enough for that student to learn from the mistake and avoid the mistake in the future.

But some students keep on making those same mistakes. It is easy and convenient to believe they misbehave deliberately and consciously – getting up each day and setting out to wreck someone’s day and ruin others’ learning. I guess this might be true sometimes, but our Behaviour for Learning policy starts by stating that ‘no child chooses to behave in a way that damages their own or others’ learning’.

This value represents a belief that, all things being equal, every child wants to be in school, enjoying learning and feeling excited about their future. So then, why are some students simply not feeling like that?

At Colmers we say that when a student is struggling, they are ‘stuck at BASE camp’ - whilst others have begun their journey up the mountain of life. Those four letters set out four fundamental reasons why a child does not make progress:

The B stands for Behaviour: Some students don’t make progress because they can’t or won’t moderate their behaviour.

The A stands for Academic: Some students find it harder to make progress because they were born with or have a diagnosis for something that makes their learning more challengiing – but not impossible.

The S stands for Social: Some students find life at school incredibly complex, confusing, noisy and uncertain – leading them to prefer to be elsewhere.

The E stands for Emotional: Some students are simply struggling with thoughts and feelings that mean writing an essay for me on the end of the Cold War is the last thing on their mind.

Colmers will never make excuses for children, nor will it give up on children. In the end that child must be able to write that essay on the end of the Cold War and overcome the problems they face. We know that in adulthood we rarely get an easy-ride and we have to find ways of overcoming our own weaknesses, worries, doubts and problems. At Colmers we believe that if we spend more time, energy and expertise on working out why a child is stuck at BASE Camp, we can ‘release’ them and allow them to catch up with the others who are heading up that mountain.

If you would like to know more about our inclusion strategy and philosophy then do get in touch with me or one of the three Assistant Headteachers for Inclusion: Mrs Wilcox (Behaviour), Mrs Moloney (Academic) and Mrs Finch (Social & Emotional).

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY…

Year 13 Leavers’ Assembly – Friday 27th May 2016 England v Wales – Thursday 16th June (normal day but fundraiser from 2.00pm to 3.15pm in the Sports Hall) Sixth Form Induction Day – Thursday 23rd June 2016 Year 11 Leavers’ Assembly – Friday 24th June 2016 Years 6 into 7 Induction Evening – Wednesday 29th June 2016 Year 6 Induction Days - Thursday 30th June and Friday 1st July 2016 Year 11 Prom Night – Thursday 30th June 2016 Sports Day – Friday 15th July 2016 Trips and Visits Week - Monday 18th to Thursday 21st July 2016 Final Day of the Summer Term - Friday 22nd July 2016 at 1pm A-Level Results Day – Thursday 18th August 2016 GCSE Results Day – Thursday 25th August 2016 First Day Back for All Students – Wednesday 7th September 2016 at 8.45am!

Achieving Excellence by Belonging Together and Challenging Mind-sets

Headteacher’s Half Term Newsletter