This week started with an excellent session with David Reid, our Education Support Officer, who leads on all things digital. David worked with the full leadership team to enhance our knowledge and skills in making best use of the Google suite to support young people. We had a particular focus on accessibility tools and helping young people to help themselves on their allocated Chromebooks. All staff are now working towards Google Educator accreditation, and the knowledge that this comes with stickers and the potential for certificates was a huge motivator for a number of us! We will continue to make use of David’s expertise as we devise learning around the digital skills part of our BGE timetable. We also completed our second session with Skills Development Scotland, looking at how we will link our learning on Metaskills with curriculum content.
We have now almost reached the top of the staffing mountain. We now have preferred candidates identified for all of our classroom teaching posts. Once their employment has been confirmed through the relevant HR processes, we will start to invite them to add their profiles to the appropriate section of the website so that you can start to put more names to faces. Although most class teachers don’t start until August, we welcome Sara Whillans and Euan Dixon to the team at The Brae this week. This means that, ahead of the summer break, they can take a full part in transition and undertake all of the relevant training required to ensure that our young people have all the support they need.
You can see the ‘big picture’ of our current staffing here:
Our Parent Engagement Group met this week to look at tracking, monitoring and reporting. We are keen that these activities are focused on regular, informative, low stakes communication to ensure that we are working in genuine partnership with our families. The slides that were used to start the discussion are included here, for information:
I have also included a brief summary of the key discussions points here:
As promised in the last Parent Engagement Group session, we have used our discussions therein to help us to pull together a draft ‘one page policy’ on communication between home and school. This draft can be accessed below, and we would welcome any further feedback via admin@rosehill.elcschool.or.uk
Communication between home and school (DRAFT)
This is the first in a series of ‘one page policies’ that we are developing. Each will be a maximum of two side of A4 paper and will outline The Rosehill Way on a number of topics, such as relationships for learning, anti-bullying, and the cost of the school day. The idea is that these will be easily accessible and easy to adapt as the school grows and we get to know our community better. We’ll continue to provide access to draft of these, and an invitation to feedback, as we move towards opening, and indeed beyond.
One of the key request from our Curriculum Information Evening was that it would be helpful to have some broad brushstrokes as to what is included in each curriculum area. We’ll be sharing our knowledge organisers for the start of the new term but, in the meantime, we hope that these summary comments are useful by way of introduction: