We have been supporting a number of universal pupil voice activities in our first few weeks of opening.

All young people have had the opportunity to take part in a Google survey around school safety. Regular safety surveys are good practice to support work on safeguarding and health and wellbeing, and support school self evaluation activities. We know that starting a new school is always daunting, and no one else in Scotland has done it with three year groups all at once. We are therefore keen to continue to have open dialogue about how everyone in our school community feels about different areas of the school.

We have also surveyed the young people on their experiences of Homeroom during the first 15 minutes of the day. This is an approach that differs slightly from our neighbouring schools and was put in place to support  wellbeing at a time of significant change for our whole population. It has been wonderful to read their feedback on the warm, welcoming environments that have been created by our Homeroom teams. Pupils have flourished in mixed year group settings and used words such as safe, warm, chilled and happy to describe the start of the day. Homerooms have benefited from lots of direct input since the start of term, and we will now move towards giving more discussion and reflection tasks to further development the positive relationships within.

The Senior Leadership Team has been taking a lead on our 5 A Day programme, in which each member of the team spends time one to one time with randomly selected pupil, finding out from them what is going well and where we can continue to develop our practice. The first two weeks of sessions focused on pupils initial impressions of the school, and we then moved on to concentrate on learning and teaching.

A real highlight has been hearing the praise for our teachers and support staff, particularly given the relatively short period of time they have been working with our young people.

In terms of next steps, we will now move on to offer some guests spots to young people on this section of the website, so that you can hear from them directly.