A message from the Head Welcome to the Shebbearian Magazine 2021 It has been an extraordinary 18 months as the world has navigated its way through the Coronavirus pandemic and it is my pleasure to be opening the Shebbearian magazine this year - the first version since I took over as Head in September 2019. As I started writing this introduction I began to think about everything that had happened this year and it really made me realise how much we have achieved and how proud I am to be the Head at such a fantastic school. As members of the Shebbear College community, we all know that it really is a special place - visitors to the school comment on this all the time, with one prospective parent saying to me recently ‘I knew as soon as I got here that this was the place for my children. I can’t put my finger on what it is, there’s just a ‘feeling’! How true that comment is - there really is a warm, special and welcoming feeling about Shebbear which we see displayed every day in our pupils, and even with the challenges we have faced during the pandemic, as our Methodist foundation outlines, we are ‘stronger together’.
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THE SHEBBEARIAN 2021
We have been blessed at Shebbear with our dynamic community who have worked to ensure that we have not only embraced the challenges, but have enabled positivity to come out of the pandemic. We have experienced many changes since March 2020, the most obvious one being the switch to remote and blended learning and I am proud of our pupils and staff for taking on this new way of working with good humour, determination, ambition and resilience. In fact, we are now a school at the forefront of digital teaching and learning and ahead of where we would have been if the pandemic had not happened. I never thought I would be able to say that I had worked as a ‘processor’ in a pandemic testing centre - but, thanks to the lockdown of January 2021, can now add this to my CV! Alongside other members of the SLT and our newly developed Health and Wellbeing team we tested staff working on site twice a week from January to March, and then when the pupils returned, we did the same for them. Not an easy process but, as we all do so well at Shebbear, we pulled up our sleeves and got on with the task. I must also mention our Chapel services in this introduction, something that has kept our school community together throughout the year. Along with Revd. Donna Leigh, who joined
