Heads Blog - Week Ending 9th December 2011
Congratulations to our Glee Club who sang at the late night shopping event in Boston Spa on Wednesday evening. They did brilliantly, particularly Finola Daley-Dee who sang a solo. We are particularly grateful to Mrs Mawtus for her commitment and support for this event.
We are very much looking forward to our annual Christmas Concert at 7pm on Tuesday in the main hall, where those of you who missed the performance in the High Street can catch up with the Glee Club as well as the jazz band, soul band, brass group, guitar group and orchestra. Tickets are available on the door for £1. Some of the performers are also taking ABRSM exams (the ‘grades’) on Friday 16th; it is not the most relaxing way to end a term and we wish them well.
It is great to welcome 23 French students from Collège Georges Sand in Revin, in the Champagne-Ardennes region of France, who will be spending a week staying with their English exchange partners. They were expected to arrive at 8pm on Thursday, however due to the shocking sea conditions in these high winds, they were delayed; they arrived at school at 10:30pm after a VERY rough crossing from Calais, I believe the correct phrase now is ... ils etaient trop fatigues!
They are spending Friday in school, visiting different lessons and getting a taste of our English school system. For the rest of the week they will visit our region, spend time getting to know their English partners and their English host families. Our young people will go to stay with their exchange partners in Revin, in March next year.
I am very appreciative of the individual welcomes these young people will receive in our homes and for the hospitality they will be shown. Of course I am grateful to the Languages Team for arranging this, however this type of opportunity only occurs because of the support and partnership of our families; we continue to be grateful for the support we receive.
Some of our young people, led by Miss Carter, were involved in the North of England Education Conference Schools competition, where they had to consider what learning could look like in 5 years time. Congratulations to Josh Hallas, Billy Gardener, Reece Bartle Coates and James McAlpin whose work is now posted on the NEEC website.
http://vimeo.com/channels/neec2012
I am also grateful to Miss Taylor who arranged for our Year 11 Engineering students to visit Drax Power Station near Selby. It is the largest (and also they tell us the cleanest and most efficient) coal powered power station in England, providing 7% of the UK’s electricity. It was a first class opportunity for the Engineers to see such a huge site first hand and to see how the power plant functioned. The particular focus for the group was health and safety in the organisation and Drax proved a really valuable and welcoming host, teaching the group that, “You are only as safe as yourself”.
As a part of our Work Related Learning initiative, Year 8 have been developing business ideas for York Race Course.
Eight teams won the opportunity to present to Tony Lee, the Operations Manager and Charlotte Cundall, the Sales, Marketing and Sponsorship Assistant of York Race Course. Congratulations to the following teams:
Team 1: Neeve Lomas, Hannah Ewen, Harriet Hurst and Sarah Birdsall
Team 2: Connor Dobson, Keenan Hughes, Lewis Roebuck, Macauley Gill and Joe Packer
Team 3: Ben Vickers, Alexander Gelderd, Johnathan Tarbatt and Dominic Ingram
Team 4: Jess Birdsall, Cathy McPhail, Georgia Owens, Zoe March, Emma Poulton, Phoebe Coster and Lucy Hillcoat
Team 5: Zak Harrison and Jamie Emmett
Team 6: Josh Leake, Aaron Lee, Richard Mawson and Charlie Davison
Team 7: Owen McDonagh, Emily Higgins, Genevieve Williams, Rebecca Burton and Mona-Lisa Curry
Team 8: Libby Van-Norman, Antonia Milostic, Megan Burton and Skye Hedley
I wanted to announce the winners here on the blog, however I am sworn to secrecy until the official announcement in assembly on Tuesday. The top two groups win a day at York Racecourse.
It was lovely to receive feedback from Tony Lee who wrote:
Thank you for the opportunity to come along to the school and to be part of this groundbreaking initiative. We were amazed by the high standard, quality and the details of the presentations that we were fortunate enough to see.
It was abundantly clear that all the teams had put in a lot of work and effort to generate the ideas, come up with the marketing material and then to produce the presentation as well.
On a personal note may I commend you and the team for your obvious passion and enthusiasm and I believe the tremendous presentations that we saw from the children is a credit to you all.
Thank you again for such a great privilege and pleasurable experience. Please pass onto the children, our thanks for the great work they have done. I hope they enjoyed doing it as much as we did seeing it all.
Elsewhere in the week I had meetings with two other secondary Headteachers looking at standards, outcomes and targets, with our School Improvement Partner Ken Tonge. We had two separate Governors’ Committee meetings, a meeting with Paul Brennan and Marcia Harding of Leeds’ City Council Children Services and I chaired a meeting of the EPOS Extended Services Cluster. There was also a Year 9 Parents’ Consultation evening; thank you for all those families who attended despite the freezing winds, your commitment to a partnership with us is much appreciated and it is important that we have a dialogue with home as we approach subject choices for Years 10 and 11.
Whenever I reflect on any week the highlight is always time spent with the admirable young people of Boston Spa School. On Tuesday I tried my hand at teaching again and took a Math's lesson all on my own! I loved being back in a classroom for the full hour and as an RE specialist, the group were very patient with any limitations in my mathematical knowledge. I also visited the Humanities Team, observing lessons in both RE and Geography. I found so much to praise, particularly in the lessons where the young people evaluated tourism in York, considered how and why different religions respond to different situations, and (certainly the highlight) examined the causes of prejudice and extremism.
As ever, never a dull moment!
