The Flagpole

Upper Sixth Mock Exam Reports will be published to the parent portal today, Friday 5 February 2021. Once published, you will receive an email notification advising that the reports are available to view on My School Portal.

There will be an opportunity for parents to discuss their child’s report at the forthcoming at the Upper Sixth Virtual Parents’ Evening on Thursday 4 March 2021 (please note date change from Thursday 18 March 2021).

We look forward to seeing you then.

Dr Michael Reddish
Deputy Head - Academic

Thursday 11 February 2021

On Thursday 11 February we are holding the virtual GCSE Options Information Evening. The evening will commence at 6.00pm and comprises a short presentation on the options process followed by an opportunity for parents and pupils to attend subject specific presentations with Q & A sessions. Links to these presentations can be found here and will be sent separately to you via iSAMS. Four sessions will be available during the evening but the sessions will be recorded should you wish to view them after the event.

We hope that this evening, together with last week’s Parents’ Evening, will give Year 9 parents the best possible support in helping their son or daughter decide their GCSE options. You will shortly receive a hard copy of the GCSE Options Booklet via the post, a pdf copy can be viewed by clicking here.

After half term, we will host Academic Review Evening appointments in the week commencing Monday 22 February, in which you can discuss your son or daughter's proposed GCSE choices with their tutor along with their general academic progress before submitting their final choices. 

The day after the Options Evening, we will email you with a link to an online GCSE Options Form so you can submit your child's GCSE choices. Please make sure to have submitted the form by 9am Monday 1 March. We will then collate that information to create the Option Blocks for next year’s GCSEs. Once the Option Blocks have been finalized, we will contact you to let you know that your child's choices have been successfully entered on to the system.

Dr Michael Reddish
Deputy Head - Academic

You will no doubt be aware that Ofqual and the Department for Education have issued some outline proposals for the examinations this summer. We anticipate detailed instructions being issued in February following the results of the consultation, but we welcome the outline proposals in so far as they fall broadly in line with what we anticipated and planned for and are what we believe is the right approach for our pupils.

The proposals broadly state that teachers would be asked to provide Teacher Assessed Grades (TAG) and would be supported in that by being provided with externally set papers and mark schemes to be sat, probably, in mid-May to early June. These tests would form a very important part of the TAG but not determine it entirely. This is very much what we had in mind with our proposed Final Internal Assessments.

These new tests would come with the advantages of being centrally set, benefitting from exam board guidance and having the additional quality assurance of random sampling across all schools in the country. Given that we will all hopefully be back in school by that point, they should also be able to run in proper controlled conditions.

We will wait to find out the specific details of the tests and their content and then look to amend our current proposals. The Final Internal Assessments would most likely be removed though, if we do have more detail on the nature and content of the exam board tests, we would certainly look to give the pupils the opportunities to practise similar tests before the real ones. As soon as we have that detail and have worked through the amended plans we will of course update you as soon as possible.

Ofqual and DfE have invited feedback on their proposals. You can find details of the proposals here and enter your feedback here.

Whilst we do understand that this is an extremely unsettling time, we are confident that our pupils are very well placed when compared to the picture nationally. We will continue to do all we can to ensure that the pupils are fully supported and prepared in order to get the best possible grades they deserve.

Please also see the links below for the FAQs we have sent our to Year 11 and Upper Sixth parents and pupils this week for your reference.

Thank you as always for your support.

Michael Reddish
Deputy Head - Academic

Ed Hester
Headmaster

The value of reading a book are well documented and we thought it timely with half-term on the horizon to remind ourselves of a few reasons why it is beneficial.

Well-being – helps relaxation and enjoyment away from a screen

• Develops creativity, imagination, curiosity and thinking skills
• Builds confidence
• Widens our repertoire of vocabulary and comprehension
• Embeds grammar into our writing
• Enhances our world picture of the diversity that surround us

Encourage reading, share books together whenever you can and get talking about them with family members. Why not get a family member to take a risk by reading something that another family member recommends?

For inspiration please click here to have a look at the list of recommendations and see also the advice about reading for pleasure here.

It has been wonderful to see pupils enjoying their Bookbuzz books and discussing them with each other.  Volunteers from Year 7 and 8 will shortly be creating quizzes and other activities based on the books in order to keep the conversations going and promote the active reading strategies that are so important across the curriculum.  If your child has not yet finished his or her Bookbuzz book, it would be great if you could encourage them to do so over the next couple of weeks, so that they can get the most out of the follow-up activities we will do.