Recruitment has continued at a pace in the last few days, with preferred candidates identified for both Chemistry and Physics. After the holiday, we’ll be focusing on PE, HE, Maths, Drama, Art, and various support roles. Many applicants have spoken explicitly about being inspired by the overall vision of the school, particularly our approaches to the curriculum, in its widest sense. They really are ready to embrace The Rosehill Way!
The quality of candidates coming though means that we can now identify teacher leaders for various aspects of school development, and Mrs Stewart-Young can begin constructing the detailed timetable in earnest. Many of you will know that we are doing things a little bit differently in terms of including, alongside traditional subject specialisms, specific timetabled approaches to cross cutting themes such as learning for sustainability and digital literacy. To this end, we will be holding an online Curriculum Evening in May, which will be open to all parents and young people. This will help you to see the big picture in terms of how we will be organising each curricular area across session 23-34. We’ll confirm the date after the holiday.
This will rely on the expertise of our Curriculum Leaders, and the senior leadership team are looking forward to welcoming them on the 24th April. In preparation, we have been developing our ‘Big Thinking’ folder of ideas and resources to ensure that we are building the best school possible. This includes a significant professional learning programme for the incoming staff, based on the core quality indicators from the How Good Is Our School (4) Framework. These are:
- 1.3 Leadership of change: Focusing on vision and values, knowing our context and community, and learning and growing with this understanding at the forefront.
- 2.3 Learning, teaching and assessment: Looking at day to day classroom experiences, with a drive on consistency of practice around what we know works best to support pupil progress.
- 3.1 Ensuring wellbeing, equality and inclusion: Building a school community that embraces every one of its members, no matter what their background or lived experiences.
A PDF copy of the HGIOS Framework is available here, if you would like to read more about the quality indicators.
Following on from last week’s update, Mr. Valentine has now completed a number of Pupil Voice sessions and we are pleased to be able to confirm that Rosehill’s agreed school values are as follows:
- Respect
- Kindness
- Responsibility
You can find some of the summary points discussed the young people here. Some of them really made me smile: Pupil Voice Input on Values
We will be doing more work on values, and how they relate to character, as part of our transition process. Our next step is to finalise our school vision statement. This may take a couple of weeks yet to ensure that we are able to link in with all partner schools, but we’re getting there!
As well as a huge number of matters related to staffing, Ms O’Neill has been particularly busy sourcing appropriate dress code items (and lanyards!). I know from personal experience how hard it is to guess whether you child is a large child or a small adult etc., so we are pulling together some samples that you can check for size during our welcome evening on the 25th May. We will also make these available during our planned school tours in June. Parents will be asked to order ‘badged’ items directly from the supplier. We’ll get those details out to you as soon as we can.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity, on behalf of the team, to wish everyone in our community an enjoyable Easter break. I am fortunate enough to be heading to Amsterdam for our first trip abroad since 2019, and you just know I am going to be posting pictures of tulips on Twitter! It’s also the first time I’ve left the dog, so wish me luck…