Hi, everyone!

We’re now well into the new school term and it’s all systems go!

This week I’ve been involved in supporting a couple of our schools with their Ofsted preparation, as well as working alongside our Hawthorns and Rochdale teams in thinking about their new schools.

Firstly, the Ofsted preparation…

A few of our Oldham schools are getting near to being in the Ofsted window.

It’s important, particularly, with “no notice” inspections, that the schools have all relevant information to hand. As you can imagine, trying to make sense of data over the last 18 months is a very tricky and a time-consuming exercise.

Several of us have spent quite an amount of time working with Springbrook and the Springboard Project.

As we start to pull together the information, we are beginning to get a positive picture of the progress each of the schools has made.

I think what I’m particularly pleased about is how both schools have ensured that the well-being and mental health of all the young people, their families (and the staff teams) have been front and centre over the last year or so.

We’re now exploring how we catch up on the lost learning. The teams are working particularly hard on developing new and revised strategies to support every single young person.

We are looking at improving the curriculum entitlement, tweaking our schemes of work and ensuring timetables are personalised and individualised. When we’ve completed this work we’ll pop it onto our websites.

Next, we move onto our new buildings…

For the first time in a while, we’ve got an update on the new free school in Rochdale.

Jenny Dunne, one of our executive directors, is leading this project and we now appear to be working alongside a great contractor. The process of building a new free school is always lengthy as we are working directly with central government.

In one way it’s a great learning curve, but in another way its particularly time consuming as every decision needs to be scrutinised and “quality assured”.

I know that we are keen to open some public events in the next few months. More news to follow.

Likewise, Pierre and the team in Tameside are getting some real traction in relation to our thinking about Hawthorns 2.

I know Pierre, Helen and Anthony had a great meeting last week with the other heads in Tameside. They were able to explain how we believe the new school will support the Local Authorities SEND strategy.

It’s important that we secure Hawthorns, Samuel Laycock and the TPRS in the continuum of provision within Tameside.

Excellent local schools for local people.

So, another busy week – we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Have a great weekend

Graham