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.