PDE / CME

September 2023

Dear Parents and Carers
Happy new school year!

As we start the new school year, I would like to inform you of some changes we have made to the school behaviour policy for this year. After pupil and parental consultation during the summer term, we have listened to your feedback in making changes. The full behaviour and rewards policy is available on the school website, but the main changes involve:

 

  • Ensuring weekly rewards are available for the pupils who do the right things day in, day out.
  • Continue to use achievement points and the other rewards that you value such as the Star of the Half Term and staff calls home and postcards.
  • Look for alternative rewards over the year that are not as much of a financial burden to parents.
  • We have invested in mobile phone lockers and will expect phones to be locked safely away in these during the day to ensure pupils cannot access material that is unsuitable, it removes the possibility of online bullying or harassment, and ensures mobile phones are not a distraction to learning. We will soon make it clear to pupils that they should not have their mobile phones with them during school time once the new lockers are in use. We would recommend that pupils and parents ensure that if they bring a mobile phone to school, they have a suitable app installed that can track the child and phone’s whereabouts. These are useful for so many things such as ensuring your child and their phone are where you would expect them to be. There are many of these apps available, one that I can recommend personally is ‘Life360’.
  • Ensuring that less learning time is lost through pupils spending time isolated away from lessons, with after school detentions being used more of a sanction. In most cases these detentions will occur the same day to ensure issues are quickly dealt with, and we will endeavour to make parents aware of these.
  • Your feedback was clear that many of you are concerned about the increased use of vapes among young people and we will strengthen our approach to these.

We have had a great start to the year, and we thank you for ensuring that we have the highest possible standards in terms of uniform and punctuality. We feel these are important lessons for life; with high standards comes tangible rewards. This was shown through the set of GCSE results in the summer being the best we have achieved as a school since the progress measures were introduced, despite the local and national backdrop of many schools seeing results below those usually achieved.

Your child will have received their new timetable and their planner that you can use to communicate with your child’s teachers or form tutor where necessary. A reminder also to download the EduLink app to track the attendance, behaviour and achievement of your child. Please see our website for more information on this.

Many thanks for your continued support.
 
Mr P Dugdale
Deputy Headteacher

View the updated policy on the policies page of our website using this link