From the Head of Secondary 10.10.2020

First of all, many thanks to parents, staff and students for facilitating such a smooth transition back into online learning. As a school, we learned a lot from our experience last term in terms of what worked well and what we could improve upon. We will continue to monitor how things are proceeding and we welcome any feedback from parents and students, so please do email me if you have any comments or concerns. As I write this on Friday I can see that attendance has been excellent for the last two days, and students are remembering and acting upon the Secondary home learning protocol. I would like to remind parents that it would be very helpful if you can contact us if your child needs to miss school for any reason, such as illness.

Well done to our Year 11 students. Moving out of the hall, and the traditional way of doing things, into taking the exams virtually was a significant change of circumstance, but they handled it with aplomb. A shout-out to Ms Service whose carefully laid out plans had to be largely abandoned in favour of a system that would work online. Ms Service’s attention to detail ensured that things went very well. In addition, the whole experience has been a useful learning curve for the students and for the supervising staff.

The Interim reports for Year 7 and our new students in other year groups will be sent home next week. I can say that we have been very pleased with how these students have adapted to what, for some, has been a very different way of working. In the time available before the home learning commenced, we tried to ensure that Year 7 in particular were familiar with how home learning worked in Secondary and again, so far, they are managing well.

Something rather different in this week’s newsletter. Follow the link to view an absolutely fabulous video produced by John Sathyamurthi and Qawiemah Leong from our Year 12 Biology class on the topic of enzymes “Meet the Enzyme”.

Even if you know next to nothing about enzymes, this is wonderful! Well done John and Qawiemah!