Can I take this opportunity to welcome everyone back to our schools and centres? I trust you have all had a wonderful break. I know many of the staff team have worked over the Summer vacation to ensure that we are ready for the challenges that will no doubt come our way. I’d personally like to thank these teams who ensure that all of the ‘compliance’ issues are dealt with so that the teams who work directly with our children and young people can use all their energies to plan, organise, teach and assess our learners.

This has been the busiest Summer I have ever known. We have admitted over 100 new children and young people into our schools and have had to recruit over 50 new staff. I’d like to welcome you all to our Trust. We know that New Bridge and Hollinwood Academy will be subject to Ofsted inspections this year. I am certain that both will perform particularly well.

The new Ofsted framework relies heavily on information being available on our websites. Our teams are redesigning our websites and we would welcome any feedback and suggestions that you may have here. The new Spring Brook Academy websites will be launching soon and we have changed the main page at www.newbridgegroup.org to better reflect all the different areas of our growing Trust; from there you can navigate to the school your child attends. We hope it is easier to understand and more importantly gives you all the information that you need. I know that families have really enjoyed seeing pictures, videos and updates on Facebook and we are hoping to keep you all informed in a similar way this year.

From a personal perspective I am hoping that schools will now have a period of stability. Last year many of my blogs centred on politics rather than education. I really hope that school and trust leaders can support our colleagues by improving teaching and learning rather than constantly liaising with politicians and civil servants!

Anyway, it’s a really short blog this week – I still think I’m on a beach in Turkey!! Have a great weekend,

Graham

You can find all Graham’s previous blog entries here