Welcome Page:- Pages 2

We are fortunate that only a small number of our staff are moving on to new things and we do wish them well. I did want to mention Jan Avery Harris who has been a passionate and inspirational teacher of Drama and Dance. Jan is retiring at the end of term and she will be fondly remembered by generations of students.

I will also be losing two members of my Senior Leadership Team. Dr Martha Hawes has been appointed to the role of Deputy Headteacher at Didcot Girls School and Lyndsey Caldwell to the role of Headteacher at St Gregory the Great School in Oxford. The fact that both of these members of staff have been promoted to such senior positions within the county speaks volumes for their achievements and influence in our school. They will both be sorely missed but we are delighted that they will remain close by and having impact on children in our local region. We will be joined at a Senior Leadership level by Kate Larminie who will become our Assistant Headteacher for Inclusion while Tom Hilton has been promoted to the role of Deputy Headteacher. I would also like to mention our wonderful Chair of Governors, Nicola Small, who is stepping down from the role at the end of the academic year. Nicola has been a highly effective Chair of Governors and has provided great support for me personally for which I am sincerely very grateful.

I would like to thank all of the staff who have given so much in very different circumstances throughout the period of the pandemic. We have asked them to work in very different ways but they have remained so positive and have responded to every challenge. I know they are so appreciative of the kind words, email and cards they receive from parents and carers. We are very fortunate as a school to have such a supportive parent/carer body and I would thank you all for work you do to help us to keep the school moving forward.

As always the last word does need to go to our students. As mentioned at the start, it has been wonderful over the past few weeks to see so many of them enjoying the wider aspects that always come with school. They have been so appreciative of their opportunities. It makes us optimistic about what September will bring and we look forward to starting afresh with them at that point.

Best Wishes

Chris Price Headteacher July 2021

Art by Jessica Crosskey - Year 7

MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR OF GOVERNORS

As this academic year draws to a close, I wanted to take the chance to reflect back on what the Governors have been looking at over the last year. And what a year!

Our role as Governors is eyes on, hands off. We’re here to work with the school to ensure clarity of vision and ethos, to hold the Headteacher to account and to oversee financial performance. We do this through constantly asking ‘so what’? So what difference is a policy, or procedure, or area of focus, having on improving outcomes for students in our school? Usually we do this by coming in to school, meeting staff and students, and ensuring that we see things on the ground. This year of course has been quite different, most of our interactions have been remote, and we have largely focussed on supporting the school to respond to the situation in the moment.

This year has been extraordinary: staff, students and parents have had to make the most enormous adjustments and put such incredible effort into making this year as successful for all as it possibly could be. The Governors have been so impressed, and really very proud, of how every element of our community has pulled together and worked so hard. Teachers have had to learn new tech skills as well as tactics to make online learning as effective and engaging as possible. But they have also, behind the scenes, had to put a phenomenal effort into the GSCE and ALevel assessment process in this year: so much additional work in creating exam style questions to use in assessments, running the assessment process, and working really hard on quality assurance so that we can be confident that the end results are rigorously fair.

The school produces a School Development and Improvement Plan (SDIP) to set goals and priorities, this breaks down into specific actions proposed by the school to achieve those priorities, and under normal circumstances the Governors focus their attention on those priorities. In this last year the SDIP has had to be very responsive to short term adjustments and so the Governing Body has adapted with the school to keep an eye on matters that really have been the highest priority over the year, while still keeping an eye to the big picture.

With COVID dominating all aspects of school and home life our Student Impact Committee has focussed particularly on 3 areas: firstly the development of online delivery of the curriculum, the IT access issues, the challenges of so much on screen time, technical issues and workload for both staff and students; secondly, we were alert to student mental health particularly as it related to the impact on different students, some for whom working remotely was positive, and some for whom it was negative, we will continue to review student wellbeing and work with the school to take forward what we have learnt COVID adjustments over the last few months; and thirdly, we have focussed on parental engagement, how to communicate most effectively with parents, including the use of online parents evenings and information videos – we will use feedback from surveys to feed into future plans.

The Resources Committee has a focus on the budget, premises and school improvement. We continue to make improvements to the environment, much of these in this year have been focused around COVID and making the environment as risk free as possible. We’ll be looking forward next year to keeping the positive elements of those changes. Other plans may have slowed, but they haven’t stopped and, happily, we continue to press ahead with construction of a 3G pitch which will improve facilities both for the school and for local football clubs.

We really value the amazing staff at Cherwell, both teaching and support staff, and staff wellbeing is a constant focus of the Resources Committee. This has been a year of extreme challenges and we know that not only have the staff worked extremely hard over this last year, they have done so with a real sense of openness to change and an ability to swing changes into action with remarkable speed.

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