Friday 6th September

Dear Parents and Carers                ,

It has been so wonderful welcoming all our children and families back into school this week, I do hope you had an enjoyable, if not restful, summer holiday! The children have all settled into their new classes really well and the school is once again filled with a wonderful buzz of warmth, happiness and friendship.

In our first assembly on Wednesday, aside from sharing what we had gotten up to over the holidays, we looked at some of our olympians’ successes and drew parallels from their values of excellence, friendship and respect to our own of love, aspiration and community. We also reminded ourselves of our school rules that help us to uphold our values.

Staffing Update

I wanted to let the community know that Susan Auton will not be returning to her role as an Assistant Teacher at Holy Trinity. Sadly, a prolonged illness means that a return to the role that she has loved for so many years is not possible. I met with her this week and she was explaining to me what a special part Holy Trinity has played in her life; her relationship with the school began when she attended as a pupil herself! I know that you will all join me in holding Susan in your thoughts and prayers at this time and those of you that know her may well see her visiting our school in the coming weeks and months. We will be putting together a plan for a celebration to thank Susan for her contribution to our school as a community and will share further details once plans are in place.

Welcome Back Worship

It is lovely to be back at Holy Trinity after the summer holidays. In worship today, we reflected on Galatians 6:2, “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ.”  We talked about the word ‘community’ and what it means to us and what this verse in the Bible calls us to do. We talked about helping one another, celebrating differences, making one another feel welcome and working together. This led to us talking about our School Development Plan and the things that we as a school community are going to focus on developing this year. Here is our visual SDP which shows you our priorities for the year ahead:

Behaviour Policy Update

In response to the feedback on the surveys from pupils, parents/carers and staff in the summer term, we have decided to revisit our behaviour policy. Our aim is to make our system more consistent, transparent and to ensure that our whole community feels better supported. We also hope that the new system will support our pupils in successfully reflecting on their actions including how they can make a change.

We spent one of our INSET days focusing on this, considering the questions that we could use to ensure that we get the perspective of all involved when dealing with a behaviour concern, considering how we should all respond to certain behaviours and agreeing how we can ensure that communication around behaviour is more open between us and our families. We hope that all of this will lead to us strengthening the relationships across our whole community.

We have created a first draft of our new policy which we will be trialling this term – you can see a copy of it below:

We will be taking feedback from across the whole community later in the term before finalising the policy later in the year. Thank you for your continued support.

Safeguarding Measure

Both of our school gates are open 8.40 – 9.00am and 3.15 – 3.50pm each day. Going forward, apart from these times we will only be allowing entry to the school site via the Carrington Road gate and would ask you to exit this way too if you are on site during the school day. We have been advised to do this as an additional safeguarding measure due to the length of time the gate remains open after being activated by staff in the office. Please don’t ask the office staff to make any exceptions.

Arrangements remain the same for Kingfisher Club and Nursery lunchtime drop off and pick up.

• Year 4 swimming starts on MONDAY – 9th September, leaving at 8:50am.
• Monday 9th September – meet the teacher years 1 and 6 30pm
• Tuesday 10th September – meet the teacher year 5 30pm
• Wednesday 11th September – meet the teacher year 2 30pm
• Thursday 12th September – meet the teacher years 3 and 4 30pm