Dear parents and carers,
What a week that was! Well done everyone who managed to stay safe and warm through Storm Chandra – and solidarity to everyone who had to deal with floods, flying trampolines, power outages and everything else that came our way.
A bit of news from me before we get started; I have been asked to stay on at Kenton Primary as interim head until the end of the summer term and I was very happy to say ‘yes’. The recent round of advertising for a new permanent head to start after Easter didn’t bring us enough applicants to shortlist from so we decided not to go ahead with the recruitment process at that point. We will readvertise for someone to take the role from September and, hopefully, get a good deal more applicants. I’m delighted to be staying and very much looking forward to finding out what it feels like to drive here in the light!
PE Impact Day
Our friend and colleague Jack Baxter will be with us next Wednesday for PE impact day. That means that next week the pupils need to wear PE appropriate clothing on both Wednesday and Thursday.
Attendance
This is a sad way to start the newsletter but it’s important.
Our attendance figures at Kenton are genuinely very poor. To give you a guide, the Department for Education do some number crunching and compare us with other schools that are broadly the same as us. In our case they will be looking at small schools with mixed age classes in rural areas.
They have compared our attendance data with 308 other schools. We are in 266th place.
Two hundred and sixty sixth out of three hundred and eight puts us in the bottom quarter of the table. That’s not somewhere that I want Kenton Primary School to be.
In a small school, each child represents quite a big proportion of the whole so if even a small number of children have poor attendance for any reason, that does have quite an impact on the overall percentage. Remember, however, that the DfE are comparing us with schools similar to ourselves. These are schools that are facing the same challenges as us and somehow getting significantly stronger attendance results.
Compared with the other primary schools in Ivy Education Trust, the story is the same. Although the difference in percentages is not huge, Kenton clearly comes out as the primary school with the lowest attendance in the trust. Taking the data from just two weeks ago, Kenton managed an attendance of 91.2%, while the other primary schools in the trust achieved 98, 95, 97 and 96 percent respectively. That’s a biggish difference and it’s typical of the week by week figures.
We do have a good number of pupils with very good attendance indeed. In fact 24 of our pupils have attendance better than 98% – you really cannot ask for much more than that. On the other hand we have around another 20 whose attendance gives me cause for concern. We need to work together to help every child to make the most of their opportunities and
It’s not immediately clear how I can challenge and support us as a community so that we can get our figures up so that if I check the portal again in another few weeks we have crept up the table a bit. I never want to put pressure on any parent to make a child attend school who is not well enough to do so – but, at the same time, the data tells me that collectively we are making some decisions which are disadvantaging our children in comparison to children at other schools. If you can think of anything I can do which will incentivise your child to come to school, even on the day that they are feeling only 90% well then do let me know. I’d like us to be absolute champions in every area of endeavour and, as of right now, this is an area we really aren’t doing so well in.
Community Welcome Morning
We are hatching plans to invite members of the wider community into school on the morning of Thursday 5th March to see our new buildings and to share some of our learning. We are hoping to invite retired people, people who used to have children at the school but who don’t have a direct link with it anymore, ex-pupils, people new to the village who may not have met us yet, aunties, uncles, grannies and grandfathers, local businesspeople…
We will be asking you to use all of your communication channels, WhatsApp groups and networks to invite as many as people as possible along.
We’ll be showing off some of our singing and dancing, sharing some poetry, offering tours of the buildings and sharing some refreshments. The KSPA will be showing off what they have been up to and sharing their plans. We’ll also asking people to share memories of the school through the years and decades.
Can you help us spread the word? It would be lovely to know that we’ll have a hall full of people who can see what we are up to and, maybe, help us attract more children to the school.
Number Day
Next Friday will be our awesome Number Day where we’ll be celebrating all aspects of maths – hoping to build up our positivity and sense of wonder at the wonderful world of patterns and possibilities. Children are invited to come to school dressed in something numbery or something rock star inspired. Have fun with this and pelase don’t be tempted to spend money on it – it’s just for fun and we all have more pressing things to do with our hard earned cash. Through the day the children will be exploring fun and fascinating aspects of maths and they will be linking up with other schools across the trust to take on some times tables rock stars challenges.
Biscuit Questionnaire
Thank you to everyone who responded to the Biscuit Questionnaire last week to share ideas of how we can spread the word. There were some very, very helpful suggestions in there so thank you all.
Last week’s biscuits were won by Jazmin and Bo, this week Archie will be sharing the prize with his family.
Apropos of that, this week’s biscuit questionnaire is a bit different. To win the biscuits, we are asking for children to design us a poster that we can use to advertise our Nursery. Think lots of colour and joy. The children do not need to do any of the lettering or add the school logo – we’ll add al that in post production. We just want a big splashy colourful poster image. There’s a deluxe packet of super nice biscuits in it for the winner. Deadline is next Friday.
Dates for Your Diary
Number Day – Friday 6th February
Come dressed up for a fun day of fascinating numbers, patterns and possibilities.
No Pupil Day – Friday 13th February
Staff will be working off site all day and the school will be closed
Half Term – Reopening on Monday 23rd February
Community Welcome Day – Thursday
Let everyone you can think of know about our community welcome morning. Songs, dances, poetry, refreshments, see around the new buildings – please spread the word to everyone you can possibly think of.