Miss Carter's Blog
Believe it or not – this week saw the first anniversary of Sandy Hill becoming an Academy. That time has certainly flown by. With so many other local and national schools following to academy status it is really is a momentous time in education.
The important thing for us, however, is how has the decision affected your children – and what does the future hold for us all at Sandy Hill?
Hopefully this last year has not seen many changes for you and your children as we always promised that the transition should be seamless and wasn’t about changing Sandy Hill . What has changed, however, are many of the processes behind the scenes that allow us more freedom – financially and educationally – to teach the children in the most effective way possible with little red-tape stopping us.
Academy status has certainly allowed us financial freedom to make improvements to the building and playground (new adventure area) aswell as implement our project to bring down class sizes in Year 5 and 6 which we will then be able to extend to Y3 and Y4. Watch this space for details of more improvements to come.
Sandy Hill sponsoring Treverbyn and supporting Padstow Academies has also allowed us to share services and only buy in the very best support for your children. This also means that our teachers can share good practice and development. An example of this is happening at Sandy Hill next week when a team of Y6 teachers from the 3 academies will be jointly moderating and assessing children’s writing to identify next steps and how to improve standards.
The future looks exciting – but now we need you!!! We are very keen to work more closely with you to help us analyse our strengths and areas that you would like to see developed and improved. We will be sending questionnaires home shortly to get your opinions – but we would also like to invite you to a social evening in January where parents, directors and staff can work together to plan for what we all want the future to include. Details of this event will follow very shortly – it would be great to see some of you there.
In the mean time – please remember that you can always see your classteacher with any concerns or comments or make an appointment and come and see me. Or even email us through our website.
I can’t believe that we are in November already – but as I realised yesterday when I walked into an Infant class and found them singing nativity songs- Christmas will soon be upon us!!! Let’s all enjoy this special time of year and look forward to working more closely together in 2012.
