This week we welcomed our Curriculum Leaders to begin their full programme of professional learning, as outlined in last week’s update. Middle leaders have a crucial role to play in terms of upholding and enacting the values of the school community. They have all completely embraced the challenge and opportunity ahead in terms of ensuring the best outcomes for young people. We are very fortunate indeed to have built such a committed and enthusiastic team. We will continue to share highlights of our professional learning and development via our Twitter accounts.

We are almost at the end of class teacher recruitment with preferred candidates identified this week for Maths, Home Economics, PE and Drama. We have also been recruiting further support roles, including workshop technicians for our STEAM provision, who well help to ensure we are making the best and safest use of these flagship facilities.

An important milestone was reached in the identification of our facilities management team. BAM FM will be looking after cleaning and janitorial services across the campus. The importance of their role in ensuring that our building is kept to the high standards we expect cannot be over emphasised, and we are very grateful to colleagues in East Lothian Council for moving this forward and supporting us with this mobilisation. Our building is beautiful and we intend to keep it that way!

Regarding transition, we continue to receive a number of direct enquiries as to arrangements, particularly from parents of young people out of catchment. Please be aware that responsibility for communicating matters related to transition remains with your child’s primary school for us long as your child remains a pupil there, and on their SEEMiS system. Mr. Valentine has been in contact with the schools of all our of catchment and non-catchment pupils and, along with Mrs. Lock, is working to create bespoke transition activities for anyone who is not part of the Wallyford Primary and Pinkie St. Peter’s communities.

Mrs. Stewart-Young has been meeting with a range of learners do talk about their experiences of learning, teaching and assessment. She will be pulling their comments together to support our conversations will all staff about high quality learning, teaching and assessment. There will be a particular focus on our learners’ understanding of challenge and progression, and the ways in which we can use feedback to support this.

Thank you to everyone who responded to our School Travel Plan survey. This will feed into our Safer Routes to School plan, which will be published later on this term. We really value the time taken in offering suggestions as to how we can all work together to support active and sustainable travel.

We have not, I promise, forgotten to finalise and share our vision statement. With busy diaries it’s taken a bit of time to ensure we have worked with pupil representatives from all partner schools- nearly there! I’m sure you will all agree what an important piece of work this is, which requires our young people at its centre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I do hope everyone had an enjoyable Easter break and managed at least some time to relax. The summer term is going to be a busy one, and I know the whole team has been excited to get cracking this week.

Firstly, some dates for your diary.

Our Parent Engagement Group will be meeting online on the evening of Wednesday 3^rd May. Invitations will be sent directly to group members. The topic of this session will be home/school communication.

On Wednesday 10^th May, we will be hosting an online curriculum evening, led by Mrs. Stewart-Young. This will give everyone in our community the chance to hear more about what our Curriculum Rationale will look like in reality, including how we intend to share information about what your child is learning in each subject area. Young people are welcome to attend this with their parents and carers. The link is here:

Parental Engagement – Curriculum

Wednesday, 10 May · 7:00 – 8:00pm

Google Meet joining info

Video call link: https://meet.google.com/eio-yycs-vey

On Monday 15^th May, we will have another Meet for the Parent Engagement Group, with a focus on tracking, monitoring and reporting. Again, invitations for this are sent directly to group members.

Please remember that, if you are using an address from outside edubuzz, you should ensure that you are in the meeting within the first 5 minutes. This allows us to pick up anyone ‘outside our organisation’ from the meeting room.

A reminder, too, that our Welcome Evening takes place on the 25^th May, from 5.30pm-7.30pm. A letter with further information, including how to book, will be made available early next month. All families are welcome, including those whose young people have been granted placing requests.

This week saw our SLT completed, with the arrival of Mrs Sarah Fleming, our DHT responsible for The Brae. Mrs. Fleming has already been in touch with the primary schools of our incoming pupils and will be arranging in person visits to start to get to know the young people over the course of the next couple of weeks. We have also confirmed that our full time class teachers will be starting in mid-May, giving them time to work intensively with Mrs. Fleming to ensure they are ready to meet the needs of our learners.

Mr. Valentine has also been busy with transition, focusing on meeting with the young people who are attending our mainstream school, but coming from outwith the catchment. If you have a child in this position, please keep in mind that communications around arrangements supporting the move to the new school remain the responsibility of your child’s current school, and will be shared by them.

Pupil voice work continues this term, with Mr Valentine working to finalise our vision statement and Mrs. Stewart-Young focusing on learners’ experiences. They are also pleased to be finalising their Thistle and Heather House emblems, which we will be able to share soon.

This week we also appointed the first of our support roles, our Pupil Support Workers. PSWs are non-teaching roles whose primary purpose is supporting wellbeing. Families with young people in secondary school already may be familiar with the role of PT Guidance and the part they play in terms of the curricular, vocational and pastoral needs of young people. This will work differently at Rosehill with aspects of this traditional role looked after by different people.

• Your child’s Homeroom teacher: Day to day attendance and punctuality, ‘first line guidance’ in terms of daily check-ins, and flagging any ongoing concerns to the wider House team.
• Pupil Support Workers: Support for wellbeing including peer relationships, positive mental health, and engagement in learning.
• House Heads: Support for young people who are involved in child’s planning processes, including multi-agency involvement. Overall responsibility for the safety, inclusion and conduct of young people in their House.

More information on our House structures and supports for your child (including Support for Learning) will follow over the course of this term.

Monday the 24^th is an important day for us as our Curriculum Leaders take up post. They are particularly excited to begin transition activities in May/June for young people in our partner schools. If you haven’t done so already, you may wish to check out their staff profiles here:

Rosehill Staff Profiles

And finally, we need your help. We are in the process of creating our school travel plan. In order to do this as effectively as possible, we would like you to complete the following short survey about your child and their school travel plans:

School Travel Plan Survey

We want this survey to be as representative as possible, so please share with your Rosehill parent networks. A number of our pupils are coming to us from out of catchment, and it is important that they are represented in the survey, too.

We will be interviewing again throughout this week for almost all of our remaining posts, so it’s another busy one! It really is a pleasure to be building such a positive team.