Dear Parents and Carers,
This letter comes with the warmest possible welcome back to the whole of the Noadswood family. It has already been a joy to see Years 7 and 11 in school, and how maturely the rest of the students dealt with their lateral flow testing schedule, too. We are thankful to all of you for the support and organisation you put in to all this working well. I have spoken to Years 7 and 11 in assembly about their ability to take charge of their own lives, letting their values and their efforts help them stay present to make the most of what each day brings them – so many of them demonstrate this every day, and it’s so important in these ongoingly changeable and turbulent times. It is so good to be back together once again, working together, and looking after each other, one and all.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me at headteacher@noadswood.hants.sch.uk with the ideas, thoughts, queries or worries you may have on your mind, and indeed things you are pleased with that you want to make sure we hear about and protect. I am keen to hear you, to listen and to respond. I owe one or two of you a meeting I didn’t quite get to in the busy end of term days of July but get to you I will. I am looking forward to each conversation – I learn from your concerns and your perceptions, and we continue to make our fantastic community even better, and the educational and wellbeing experience of your children continues to go from strength to strength. We are the people who can achieve that, together – don't hesitate to get in touch.
School Day Timings
We will continue with our school timings from last year, which were extremely successful and allowed a little more space for students at social times. The only difference is the school day will finish at the same time for all students. The timings are below:
*Please note: restorative meetings can take place up until 3.30pm for students who have failed to meet our school expectations (please see the behaviour policy update below)
Social Time Areas
Behaviour Policy
As we bring all our students back together again, we also wanted to give you an update on some tweaks we have made to our behaviour policy. We've worked with our students, the pastoral team, our team leaders and our trustees and thought about how we can work together to ensure we have a community in which everyone can feel happy and safe in the best possible learning environment for all.
We know that sometimes things can go wrong and mistakes can be made, and so we will continue with our restorative approach which provides an opportunity for students and staff to talk together at the end of the day, discussing any incidents and ensuring everything is in place to have a successful next day. We want to make sure that those restorative appointments are meaningful for both staff and students.
We’ve developed a very simple to follow 5 step staged response for those times when students may not behave or commit to their learning in line with our Noadswood values and expectations. The different steps involve various staff, from the classroom teacher, the year leaders and, for more serious incidents, a member of the senior leadership team. For each step, the restorative appointment will be run slightly differently with a different focus and will vary in time.
The very large majority of our restorative appointments are for 10 minutes after school (step 1). If your child does not attend this appointment, they will be set a second appointment (step 2) which will last for a little longer. Should this step 2 appointment be set, you'll be contacted either on the day itself or the next day to let you know the details of the incident itself and to discuss any other support that could be put in place.
Covid Specific Information – September 2021
The updated government operational guidance (click here) is a summary explaining the actions schools should take to reduce the risk of transmission of coronavirus from September 2021 onwards. Although specific measures such as bubbles / mandated mask wearing are no longer in place, it is prudent for our community to follow, where they can, precautions which are sensible and do not impact learning.
We have summarised the key parts for students and parents upon return below:
Lateral Flow Testing
As you know, if you have provided consent, students were expected to complete two lateral flow tests at the very beginning of term within school. Students with consent given will then be expected to regularly test – every Wednesday and Sunday night as before, with a positive lateral flow then requiring the student to remain at home and book and complete a PCR test.
Bubbles and Positive Covid Cases
Bubbles (students not mixing across year groups) are no longer expected, and students will have access to the entirety of the Noadswood site as last term.
We will operate our internal one-way system, expect students to sit in their seating plans (though not all facing the front) and continue with the split break / lunch – all of this has been a real success, and not only because of Covid. Toilets will also remain split for specific year groups during all social times – the students are used to this.
Students can enter / leave by any of the three main gates (please be aware of our new perimeter fencing so these three gates are the only access points):
If a student becomes positive with Covid, you and they will pass details to the NHS test and trace – no student who is identified as a “contact” will need to self-isolate, however they will then need to complete a daily lateral flow tests for the specified time.
Face Coverings, Sanitation and Ventilation
Noadswood will continue with regular cleaning of the site, specifically of touch points. Our staff we regularly remind students to wash their hands and to minimise sharing of equipment.
It will be a personal choice for students to wear masks / carry their own sanitisers however Noadswood will recommend students do this, though there is absolutely no expectation that they do, nor will they be asked to wear one.
Our classrooms will have doors and windows open to maximise ventilation, so it is important for the youngsters to have their jumper and/or their blazer with them every day, and to consider seriously having a coat with them when the days get colder. We will continue to update our risk assessments as the year progresses and if guidance is altered.
If you would like to read our whole school risk assessment, or have a look at the flow charts for what we will do if an adult or child gets a positive Lateral Flow result or is a contact, please do have a look here: (click link). We would welcome any questions you have about this to our usual health@noadswood.hants.sch.uk and this is also still the email address for any Covid questions or info you want to share with the school – you used this brilliantly last year, and Mr Crowley, Mrs Loveday and I, who sit behind this email address, are very grateful for the accuracy and helpfulness of all of the emails we get.
Flow Charts
We've also put together our "what to do if" flow charts, which we hope are really easy to follow. These can be found on our Covid specific page:
Symptoms
Lateral Flow
Close Contacts
PCR
Uniform
Please can we also take this opportunity to remind you of our uniform expectations (click link).
If you have any questions about this or require any support with respect to the purchase of uniform, please do contact your child’s tutor or Year Leader.
Contacting your child’s Year Leader team
As you will know from our previous communications (click here), we have made some organisational changes to our pastoral team, with our key pastoral team moving from House Leaders to Year Leaders. Don’t worry, we’ve still got our fabulous house system and can’t wait to see which house will be victorious in the termly house cup as always. Our year leaders and assistant year leaders will now have complete oversight of your child’s pastoral well-being and academic progress. A reminder then of the year teams and how you can contact your child’s Year Leaders;
Year7@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year Leader - Mr S Wilkinson; swilkinson@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Assistant Year Leader - Mrs D Ward; dward@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year8@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year Leader - Mr D Rowling; drowling@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Assistant Year Leader - Mrs J French; jfrench@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year9@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year Leader - Mr O Marsh; omarsh@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Assistant Year Leader - Mrs J French; jfrench@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year10@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year Leader - Miss K Rawlinson; krawlinson@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Assistant Year Leader - Miss L Fitzgerald; lfitzgerald@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year11@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Year Leader - Mrs K Martin & Mrs H Way; kmartin@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Assistant Year Leader - Miss L Fitzgerald; lfitzgerald@noadswood.hants.sch.uk
Of course, you can also contact us by telephone or by dropping the colleagues above, your child’s tutor or indeed any of us an ePraise message whenever you need us.
Noadswood Apps
Our digital apps will be updated by the end of this week for all students to access the normal information, including timetables, tutor groups, points etc… For more information about the apps, please visit our website (click link) which includes step-by-step guides:
Digital Detox
Those of you who have been in the Noadswood family a while will know that before Covid, we encouraged a Digital Detox throughout the school day: from tutor time to the moment the students leave the school site, phones should be in pockets or bags, only visible if a member of staff requests it for a learning reason. If your child needs to consult their phone for any other reason, they must ask, and if they need to call you, they need to pop up to their Year Leaders’ office or ask any of us, and we will provide a safe space for them to do so. If you need to reach them, you can call the school or drop an ePraise message or email in.
We know that during the lockdowns, students needed their devices for their learning all the time and these habits within the school day broke down – we understood that, everyone had enough on their plates to manage.
However, in this new year, we would like to resume that Digital Detox, please. Students were surveyed last term and commented that they agreed since lockdown the use of mobile phones has become greater.
The majority said that they think their use of their phone is 'healthy' that they can go quite a long time without using their phones and disagreed that they had become 'dependent' or finding themselves looking at the phone at regular intervals. However, we are often back to a situation where the majority of students are on their phones in their social time, rather than fully interacting with each other, and we also know that a lot of negativity can be thrown around on mobiles, as well as all the good things they offer, so we want to make sure our students have a complete break from all that pressure from the start until the end of the school day.
Up until Monday September 20th, we will be giving reminders to the students to put their phones away and out of site throughout the school day – this also applies to ear pods. From September 20th, should phones or ear pods be misused, they may be confiscated and secured safely until the end of the school day. We got to the point where this hardly ever happened and we know we can get there again – adults, too, need a breather from those screens. We are all in this together.
Parent Staff Association and our Community Garden Project
We have a thriving PSA that has held steady despite the pandemic, ably chaired by our colleague, Claire Blowers, and supported by a strong team of parents and colleagues – I am grateful to them all for the work that they do and for the support they provide to me and the school. If you are interested in joining this fab group, please drop an email to psa@noadswood.hants.sch.uk. One parent has already done so and we were all thrilled!
Following the huge delays caused by Covid, we are keen to progress our Community Garden, and we are well underway with the planning. We need to keep plugging away for the funding we need, and we wonder whether we could plead for your help? We entered a competition through Dobbies Garden Centre: 'Help your community grow project' and we have been shortlisted to the last 3! 🙂 We now need to get as many votes as possible to be in with the chance of winning. We would really appreciate your help and assistance so that we might win equipment and plants all of which will go directly to the Community Garden for your children and our local community. All you have to do is vote!
Below is the link that you will need to click on to vote.
You just need to accept the cookies, enter your name & email, select CADNAM as your store & click next on NOADSWOOD. It’s as simple as that, but it could make a real difference to our project (click link).
We hope this update provides you with helpful information, and we look forward so much to updates this year that say less about Covid and more about all the brilliant things your students and my colleagues get up to every week.
With all our best wishes,
Kathryn Marshall and the Noadswood Leadership Team