Dear Parents and Carers,
We are delighted to share with you our Christmas celebrations for December.
During this month we are launching our annual Kindness Challenge, giving students the opportunity to have their kind acts acknowledged and the opportunity to win gift vouchers for their family. Students can collect Bee Kind cards from the main reception and once completed these can be posted into the Kindness box- winners will be drawn every Friday!
Students will be able to enjoy their Christmas lunch and Christmas Jumper Day on Wednesday 18 December and we will continue to celebrate praise on Marvelous Mondays and Proud Thursday every week. During the final week of term we will be celebrating our ACE winners in Y7 and our top praise points winners with Student Voice leading celebrations.
Y11 will have their own personalised praise events including a trip to Meadowhall for eligible students. On the final day of term, we will be sharing Praising Stars reports with students in a Christmas themed event during breaktime! A fantastic way to end the term.
This year we will be congratulating our overall highest STAR students with some festive treats being delivered on the final day of this term. Our Y7 Bronze ACE awards will be issued on Thursday 19 December with a special celebration event taking place P5 with games and treats for students to enjoy. Students will also receive their Bronze ACE badges to wear proudly on their blazers. We will also be delivering treats to our Captivating Class winners in the final week. One class will be selected as the Captivating Class Champions based on the number of nominations and comments submitted by class teachers throughout the half term.
We know that great attendance is the key to doing well at school and as we are in the final weeks of term our Battle of the Bands becomes an exciting time in the academy. Did you know that almost all students (90%) or young people with attendance rates below 85% fail to achieve five or more good grades of GCSE. We are determined that every students’ attendance is the best it can be, so that all students achieve their potential.Every student is allocated a band according to their current attendance. Our bandings are based on increments of 5%, beginning with Platinum for 100% attendance and Gold for 95-99.9% attendance. By improving their attendance students can rise through the bands and seeing progress is clear to all. Every student is aware of the band they belong to and what this means to them. Every week we celebrate students who have moved up in bands. This is inclusive and looks to recognise the progress of all students
The academy is proud to announce our annual charity and community events during December. We have, for the last 8 years, supported the Cash for Kids Mission Christmas. This has involved our school community collecting toys for young people in the South Yorkshire community. We warmly welcome donations from our school community and it is wonderful to see students arriving with gifts for others to place under our tree. We are also delighted to be working once again with AGE UK. Our Student Voice Charity Committee will be producing hampers for our local community with AGE UK will collect our donations on the 16 December.
On Thursday 5 of December our Charity Committee will host our senior citizens afternoon tea which will include live music from Shafton Brass, Shafton Choir and another wonderful quiz from our SV Prime Minister Ben! We cannot wait to welcome our guests to this fully booked event for the fifth time and share the wonderful sense of community we have at Shafton.
We are extremely proud of the community events we are involved in and proud of student achievements throughout this term. What a wonderful December it is going to be!
Yours faithfully,
Sarah Riley Mel Taylor
Assistant Principal Associate Assistant Principal