From the Head of Secondary 22.05.2021

The vast majority of our students continue to work well online, and Years 11, 12 and 13 have been coming into school to sit their examinations. These continue next week, during the half term break, and I would like to thank Mrs Hallas and those staff who will be assisting with this in ensuring that everything goes smoothly.

The schedule for the internal Year 7 to 10 exams is being finalised and will be sent out in due course to students and to parents. Form tutors have been giving advice about exam preparation and subject teachers have advised their classes on the topics they will be assessed on.

At this time of year we are looking ahead to the next academic year, and part of that is the preparation of the school calendar of events. Secondary teachers are keen to run day trips relevant to their subject areas and we will be scheduling those in the hopeful anticipation that they will go ahead. Such events as Parent Teacher meetings will also be scheduled in the knowledge that if they cannot be held in school, we will easily be able to switch them online, building on all the practice we have had this year!

In last week’s newsletter I mentioned the number of online professional development opportunities that are out there for staff [for example the FOBISIA CPD and Safeguarding Conference took place on Thursday and Friday of this week] and there are also opportunities for students. Read on to read about how three of our students got on at the FOBISIA Student Leaders Summit and well done to Jessmine, Harsh and Alexis for volunteering for this!

You will recall that the Charity Committee, together with the MFL department, put out an appeal last week for rice donations. Even though school was only open for one day, we collected 40+ 5kg bags of rice, which was an amazing achievement!

Mrs Margaret Renshaw
Deputy Principal/ Head of Secondary

On Friday 7th May we attended an exclusive summit held by FOBISIA alongside 100+ students from around Asia. During the summit, professional speakers had organised talks and activities about Leadership. The talks were made specifically for this summit, so it was very different from your typical inspirational YouTube videos. We also had live question and answer sessions, where we could get detailed answers for the questions asked.

Many of us were curious about what would be discussed in these talks and what we could learn from successful and experienced people. Furthermore, we felt that it would be an opportunity to expand our knowledge about how to lead a team and the different ways of doing so. After each talk, we were given time to reflect and write what we learnt. Doing this, made us realise how much we have learnt and how we can apply the advice in our own daily lives.

In our opinion, the two talks that we thought were the most interesting were presented by Miss Sue Langley and Professor Peter Stokes. Nevertheless, every one of the speeches were inspiring and great in their own ways. Miss Sue Langley gave a talk about the two systems in our brain which affect our decision-making. It was interesting to learn about the science behind our emotions. We learnt that the limbic system in our brain needs less fuel to run than the prefrontal cortex, which means that we do not need to put in too much effort to perform the activities. Professor Peter Stokes was very straightforward about his opinions and he gave us an insight to the different leadership styles. He also shared with us his past experiences with being a leader so that we can avoid making the same mistakes.

The best bit of the summit was listening to all the experienced leaders share their involvements in leadership and personal stories. It was very helpful to hear the tips on being a better leader.

We also learnt that as technology is changing we have to change our ways in leadership and further learn how to adapt to these changes. This will help in the future as we may not know what other technological upgrades are yet to come. Dr Rozana showed key skills are vital and what people skills you need to become better leaders especially in this digital age and remote working. This would be really helpful for group projects and clubs.

As some of you might remember, in our Key Stage 3 English lessons last year we used to have a Word of the Week vocabulary competition. Now, with the end of term and final house point tallies fast approaching, we in the English Department want to bring that back!

The only difference is, this year, both the reading and the Word of the Week competition will place during morning tutor time. The results for each tutor group will then be passed to me and the overall winners for each Year Group will be posted in the newsletter on a weekly basis.

As an added incentive, the finalists for the term will be invited to take part in our Word Master Championship during the End of School assembly. Not only will there be prizes and a shiny gold cup up for grabs but the winners will have the honour of contributing the final house points for the year to ensure either a Sapi, Sulug or Gaya victory.

Although we will not be beginning the competition until next half term, what better time than the upcoming holiday for our students to delve into a new book and traverse their way through the multitude of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that the English language has to offer.

Happy reading and I am looking forward to receiving a plethora of intriguing and impressive lexical submissions on our return to school.

Ms Colley