Well, another week flies by!

I managed, at the beginning of the week, to spend some time at Medtia.

The adaptations we made over the summer are absolutely tremendous. They have transformed our learning environments. I am certain that the young people will benefit. The numbers in our post 19 provision have more than quadrupled in the last 4 years. Our community-based offer continues to engage and inspire.

Talking about buildings, this week I also had a meeting relating to the extension at Hawthorns. As you know, if you a regular follower of my blogs, the numbers of children in all our schools keep increasing – almost on a monthly basis. Tameside Local Authority are managing the extension to Hawthorns that will allow us to put in extra classrooms, reinstate our library and ensure the staff have a staffroom. Over the summer we had to convert the old staffroom into a classroom! We were informed on Thursday that, following a council meeting taking place in early October, we should get the go ahead to start the building works. Once I have a timeline we can communicate it to families.

Our plans to extend New Bridge have all been approved and building will start, on site, in the next few weeks. As I understand it, the work involves some new classrooms and some very exciting outdoor learning spaces. More news to follow.

Earlier in the week I had a meeting with a couple of families whose children attend Hollinwood. They raised concerns about the growth in numbers in the school and wanted to understand how we were going to manage extra children in the future. I felt the meeting was so productive that we agreed it would be worth having a couple of open meetings with families and parents to give you all an understanding of some of the challenges schools face within the present system. I will publish some dates on our website in the next few days – please feel free to pop along to ask any questions.

Our work at Spring Brook, this week, has centred around recruitment. Our amazing staff teams have worked at ‘under capacity’ for the last few weeks and we have been working really hard behind the scenes to get the appropriate support into the school. I think we have achieved this. We have also started a piece of work to further develop our curriculum offer. This will directly link into our new free school (Springboard) developments.

So, all in all, a much better week than last. I’ve been working with our staff teams and children and not just budgets!!

Have a great weekend,

Graham

You can find all Graham’s previous blog entries here