January 2024: Welcome Back

January 2024

Dear Parents and Carers,

 

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your support last term; I hope that you and your family had a lovely Christmas break and enjoyed the festivities.

 

It continues to be an absolute privilege and honour to lead as Principal at Outwood Academy Shafton.  As a community, we all want the best possible education for the children that we serve and in order to secure this, as a school, we must continue to maintain our high standards and maximise curriculum learning time.   The children of Shafton and its surrounding areas deserve, and are entitled to the very best education and we continue to work effectively together to make this a reality.  

 

In addition to core learning time, we offer a raft of enrichment opportunities and we encourage students to attend as many different enrichments as they would like to. This is especially important for our Year 10 and Year 11 students who will be able to enhance their lesson-based learning alongside extension work which will further support revision and exam preparation.

 

We will be continuing with our weekly celebrations of student success whether that is celebrating student work on #ProudThursday, congratulating students on their Random Acts of Kindness, celebrating good attendance or recognition from staff for a student to receive a Principal’s postcard.  Our ‘Belonging’ curriculum continues to create a range of opportunities and prepares our students for their futures.

Due to the academic calendar, term 2 is only 10 weeks long, with February half term coming at the end of week 5.  With this in mind, it is important that we keep the ‘main thing’ (transformative teaching and learning), the ‘main thing’! To do this, I ask that we work together to ensure we waste little time addressing the basic standards and expectations that all students are already aware of.  To ensure this happens, I have included 2 links. The first is to the academy uniform policy and the second is a link to the academy’s 'Positive Discipline for Learning and Life' policy.  All students must also bring a pencil case including black or blue pen, pencil and ruler as well as their planner.

As you will be aware, all students are greeted every morning on their doors, at this point any uniform misdemeanours are addressed so that students are dressed in-line with the uniform policy as they enter the academy.  However, on occasions, a small proportion of students then make amendments to their uniform during the day and this results in sanctions being issued. I wanted to take this opportunity to seek out your support and ask that you remind your child/children of the more common uniform misdemeanours that occasionally occur to help us prevent this:

We worked hard over the final 2 weeks of the last half term to build opportunities for students to be successful and have a fresh start for January 2024. We completed Fresh Start intervention for students owing 10+ C4/C5 sanctions and we consolidated sanctions for students. Parental support and engagement has been brilliant and gratefully received, resulting in positive choices made by students. As a result of this, we start 2024 with 'New Year, New You' assemblies focusing on how our students and community can make the most of the new year by working together to get the best outcomes for all attending Outwood Academy Shafton. 

As many of our staff are student facing throughout the day with the majority of our teachers in front of a class for 22 periods a week, the most convenient way to communicate is via email. If you know the name of the staff member you are trying to contact you can email them directly by using their first initial and surname in the following email format a.teacher@shafton.outwood.com. 

 

Alternatively, you can email enquiries@shafton.outwood.com and mark it for the attention of the relevant staff member. We aim to respond to all communication received in this format within 48 hours, but please bear in mind that this may vary if a staff member is absent for any reason. The enquiries email account is manned from 08:00 – 3:45, Monday - Friday during term time. 

 

Our advice for improving this flow of communication is as follows:

 

In addition, each year group has a Learning Manager, these are key colleagues who can be contacted should you require further information. Learning Manager email addresses can be found on the homepage of our website and are pinned to the top of our Twitter and Facebook pages.

A reminder that you can catch up on all things Shafton via our (X) Twitter account @OutwoodShafton 

We use texts as a quick way to share information with you. This can be reminders about key events happening in school, attendance matters and links to letters. Please note that all texts will go to first named contacts on our system. Copies of key letters can also be found on the website at the bottom of the home page and is titled ‘Updates from the Academy’.

Once again, I would like to wish you all the best for 2024  and thank you for your unwavering support and commitment.

Your faithfully,

File

Jan 2024 welcome back.pdf 211 KB