As promised last week, the results of our two most recent Google surveys have now been collated, with over 250 responses in total to the questions on your preferred school emblem, and House names.

The most popular option for the emblem was Option 2, the traditional shield shape. This was viewed positively by 83% of respondents. The option without the school name will feature on dress code items, and the option with the name will be used in correspondence etc. As a reminder, this is the chosen image:

Rosehill emblem

Rosehill emblem with name

However, the square emblem also proved very popular so we are working on using this shape for House emblems featuring the new House names…

I can also now confirm that, with just over two thirds of the vote, our Houses will be known as House Heather and House Thistle. Mrs. Stewart-Young will be the DHT link for House Heather, with Ms McCabe in the role of House Head. Mr Valentine will be the DHT link for House Thistle, with Mrs Yeoman as the House Head. Staff as well as pupils will be allocated a House, creating a ‘school within a school’ to support transition and ongoing inclusion and wellbeing. This will include allocated Homeroom teachers, who will have daily contact with each young person and an overview of their attendance, punctuality and engagement. We will provide more information on the Homeroom programme as part of ongoing transition communications.

Mr Valentine is currently working with our partner schools to allocate each young person to a House. This will ensure that young people who are part of the Child’s Planning process will be known to a key member of the House Team as soon as possible.

We also thought it would be good for you and your child to get to know a little more about the staff who are joining the school. To this end, each has completed a profile with some basic information about their background. Our incoming DHTs and Curriculum Leaders have all completed these, and we will add more staff as we firm up further personnel and start dates. I have added links here for ease, but they are also available on the staff section of the school website: Rosehill Staff Profiles

Tonight is our ‘Meet the SLT session, which we are really looking forward to. It’s always good to be able to begin to put names to faces and to be clear that, as well as senior leaders, we are also real people with families, friends and interests beyond school! I also look forward to having some time with the Parent Engagement Group in the coming weeks. Our first session will contribute to firming up on the school values and vision statement, and this will work alongside activities that Mr. Valentine is leading with Pupil Voice on the same topic. It’s important to us that our vision and values are things that we live and breathe, not just posters on a wall or banners on a website. Therefore, we want to spend time on getting this absolutely right. As well as this online engagement, we are in the early stages of planning an in-person Welcome Evening in May, kindly hosted by Wallyford Primary school- more on this in the lead up to Easter.

This week also saw the welcome arrival of our DHT Curriculum, Mrs Lynsey Stewart-Young. As is the case for the whole team at present, Mrs Stewart-Young will be heavily involved in recruitment over the next couple of weeks. However, her next main priority will be the continued development of our ‘shadow’ timetable into something that reflects updated information on personalisation and choice, staffing, and the ever increasing role: Rosehill is definitely growing! We do not take for granted the trust you have placed in us to look after the people who are most important to you.

 

It was wonderful to be able to officially welcome Mr Neil Valentine to the team this week. Our SLT office is starting to fill up nicely, and we even need to get some sort of milk rota organised! Mr Valentine will be focusing on the following key areas in the coming weeks:

• Completing S3 Personal Pathways work (our projected roll has increased over the last couple of weeks)
• Planning for enhanced transition for those P7 mainstream pupils who would benefit from this
• Organising pupils in all year groups into Houses and classes (form class, practical class and homeroom class)
• Liaising with MGS to further develop plans for transition into S2 and S3
• Linking up with families and professionals to support young people who currently benefit from regular Child’s Planning Meetings

Planning for P7 transition is well underway with a series of key dates agreed with our partner primaries. The summary schedule can be accessed here: Rosehill P7-S1 Transition Plan (Universal)

We will provide a detailed secondary transition plan as soon as we can. This can only be done in line with MGS timetable construction, which is ongoing at present. However, we do know that it will be based on Rosehill staff visiting MGS on Monday and Friday mornings throughout June, to work directly with our new pupils.

Mrs Sarah Fleming is leading on transition for pupils coming to The Brae and will be involved in the relevant CPMs scheduled after her 17^th April start date.

Transition has also involved the support of Morrison Construction, and it was great to chat with some of the P7 pupils who have already had the chance to visit the WLC site, thanks to the organisation of our partner primaries. Our thanks also go to the Morrison Team for facilitating this. There was a lot of excitement on the faces of our young people as the move begins to feel a bit more ‘real’.

With regards to staffing and recruitment, this is a particularly busy time. Following a successful job matching process within ELC, we now have our two House Heads identified. Ms Julie McCabe and Mrs Michelle Yeoman are both currently at Ross High School, and have worked in Pupil Support roles for a number of years. Our House Heads will have overall responsibility for the pastoral, vocational and curricular needs of our young people, and are a vital part of our leadership structure. They will be supported by Pupil Support Workers, the likely first point of contact between school and home. We are still working on start dates, but will update you as soon as possible.

Our national adverts have had an unprecedented level of interest, with literally hundreds of applications received for our most recent batch of posts. Interviews for many of our class teachers and some of our support roles will be taking place over the next couple of weeks, and I look forward to sharing the results of these as appropriate.

This means that I won’t be quite so available on the end of an email, so please bear with me! On the subject of communication, we now have a (virtual) ‘school office’ address: admin@rosehill.elcschool.org.uk We will still keep an eye on the WLCTransitions account, but the Rosehill email should pick things up a little quicker. Please keep in mind that we are still only 3 people in total, for a projected school roll of well over 300- we will always get back to you as soon as we can.

Thank you to everyone who has voted for their favourite school emblem, and their preferred House names. I don’t take the level of interest and support for granted. These will stay open until the end of today (see last week’s updates for the links), and the results will be shared next week.

Firstly, thank you to everyone for their positive feedback on the new school name. It feels like I have had a baby J Of course, not everyone got their first choice. However, we will all be aware that there will be a lot of decision making going on over the next few weeks and months, and that none of us will always get exactly what we wanted! What’s important is that we celebrate the voice of the young people coming through and the opportunity to build a genuinely collaborative identity.

Our next step is to decide on the school emblem. In the interests of complete transparency, I will say that I would have hoped to do a much more thorough consultation on this. However, we are very aware of the need to complete discussions with suppliers on dress code in particular, which can take a while. We have therefore had to opt for a streamlined process and would like you to consider three options for our school emblem, all on a similar theme.

The three options can be viewed here: School emblem options

The reasons for the key choices in the emblem are here: The Rosehill emblem

Please view/read these carefully before making your selection on the Google Form here: School emblem vote

This will remain open for one week only, to allow us to make the required progress on dress code items.

We also have a second Google Form request. In line with the information gathered on the school Houses and the overall desire for themes from nature, we have narrowed our categories down to those we think work well with the Rosehill identity and are going to go for House names which are either Scottish wildflowers or Scottish trees. Please note your preference here: House names second survey

Again, this will remain open for one week only, to allow us to fully engage in the process of assigning young people to Houses, and beginning to develop positive relationships with the relevant adults.

As well as getting down to the detail around school identity, I have also had the chance to lift my head up and look outwards a couple of times in the last week, with two visits to other new schools.

The first of these was to Winchburgh Academy. Their story is quite similar to our own, with the school being built in a former mining village, and designed to support a rapidly increasing population. HT Jonny Mitchell opened the school in August 2022 with (wait for it) only 56 pupils. He talked through both the challenges and opportunities afforded by a small school population, and we really focused in on the importance of nailing routines, boundaries and expectations early doors- with lots and lots of repetition as required.

I also got up to Waid Academy in the East Neuk of Fife. Although their context is very different to ours, the real lessons here were around running a building that is a genuine community campus. HT Scott Duncan talked through how partnerships evolved over time and what to do when unexpected clashes occur- such as Bookbug sessions during SQA exams! It was so helpful to be able to see the practical aspects of multiple agencies operating under one roof, and what this does to enhance the offers we can make to young people.

I am very grateful to both for giving so generously of their time.

Another highlight of the week was the first day of our new Business Manager, Paula O’Neill. I was very, very excited to have coffee with a colleague on Tuesday morning! Ms O’Neill will have a crucial role to play at this stage in Rosehill’s development, including finance, procurement, and a bigger recruitment drive than most of us will ever see in our careers. She is also currently working on pulling together contact details for our (gradually settling) school roll, which will make keeping in touch with our families so much easier.

Thank you to all of you who have already signed up to be part of our Parent Engagement Group. I will leave the form open during the course of this week in case it has dropped of anyone’s ‘to do’ list by accident. You can sign up here: Parent Engagement Group

We will be in touch soon about our first session, which will focus on vision and values.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You will be aware that some exciting news emerged today week about the name of our school. Whilst the whole site will continue to be referred to as Wallyford Learning Campus, the secondary school part of the site will be known as Rosehill High School. It was appropriate for this name to be announced via East Lothian Council in the first instance. The link to the ELC statement is here:

ELC Rosehill statement

Please take a look at the link below for a summary of the data that informed this decision, and more information about the next stage in the House Names process:

School Name and House Names Summary Data

You will note from this that we can now move on to think about the school crest/logo/emblem, as well as those final House names. I will be in a position to share some options with you at the end of this week.

Thank you to everyone who took time to take part in the consultation process. I have also already heard from a parent whose two children were delighted to have had their first choice of name make it through! Others will of course have hoped for another result, but I know we will all get behind the name Rosehill and what it means for our young people; a community in which they can grow, thrive, and become the best versions of themselves.

 

As noted before the February break, we have been working hard on recruiting a significant number of middle leaders in the last couple of weeks. My thanks go to ELC colleagues who have been an important part of this piece of work, whether providing admin support, sitting on panels, or offering input into the process itself.

Our preferred candidates are as follows, and we are working towards them joining us just after Easter:

• Mr. Paddy Cuthbertson will join us from Turnbull High School in East Dunbartonshire. Mr Cuthbertson will be our Curriculum Leader for Health and Wellbeing.
• Miss Millie Mitchell will join us from Craigmount High School in Edinburgh. Miss Mitchell will be our Curriculum Leader for the Expressive Arts faculty.
• Mrs. Jade Woodhead will join us from North Berwick High School. Mrs Woodhead will be our Curriculum Leader for Maths and Numeracy.
• Mrs. Catherine Lock will join us from Musselburgh Grammar School. Mrs Lock will be our Curriculum Leader in Support for Learning, and will be a particularly important part of our P7 transition work.

As you will have noticed, the chance to work at the campus has attracted excellent candidates from both within East Lothian and beyond, and I am absolutely delighted that we are able to draw on this breadth of knowledge and experience from a range of local authorities.

You may also have noticed this national level of interest in WLC has extended to the media, too. For those who haven’t yet seen it, the link below is for a recent article in the Times Educational Supplement. My youngest daughter’s comment was that she could ‘hear’ me when she was reading it, which I have decided to take as a good thing!

TES Article on WLC

Many of you will have heard me talking before about the importance of partnership with parents. For many schools, this focuses on the vital role played by Parent Councils. However, in our current situation, there are a couple of important points to consider if we want to work as a genuine collective:

• We have a lot of important decisions to make with regards to policy and practice in the coming months, where parent input would be hugely valued; but we can’t officially convene a Parent Council until the school is open.
• Many parents are keen to work with the school at this important time, but will not be able to attend lengthy, formal meetings or a regular basis, whether due to work commitments, caring commitments, or any other aspects of busy lives.

To this end, we have decided to form a Parent Engagement Group. This will be an important forum throughout the summer term and, if successful, is something we may decide to continue with as we move into next session. The group will be based around a series of short (45 minute max) ‘single item agenda’ Google Meets. The time of day/day of the week will be varied to support as many people as possible getting involved. There is no need to commit to all of the Meets (just drop in when it works for you), and there is no need to prepare anything in advance!

If you would like to be involved, please sign up using this Google Form. Thank you to everyone who has already indicated an interest.

Parent Engagement Group

This form will remain open until 12 noon on Friday 3^rd March. Please ensure that you include your preferred email address for us to send the Meet schedule and the relevant joining details thereafter.

One of our first topics for discussion and decision making will be around finalising our school vision statement and school values- we are certainly not short of ideas! Thank you to everyone who contributed to the survey on this topic. The data summary can be accessed here: Vision and Values Data Summary

We have made some good progress with regards to agreements around the naming of the school, its Houses, and the SCN provision. Please bear with us as we engage with all stakeholders. One lovely thing I can share this week is that our SCN provision will now be known as The Brae. This reflects the hilltop position of our building and draws on the idea of being able to take in the views of our beautiful East Lothian countryside wherever we are within it. Mrs Fleming has already begun to connect with the East Lothian ASN team and looks forward to playing a full part in transition of pupils to The Brae when she starts in April.

It’s been a very busy week of recruitment, and we now have preferred candidates for all but one of our Curriculum Leader posts (and we’re nearly there with the last one!). I will share more information about the newest members of the team immediately after the February break, as it’s important they have the chance to share their news with their own school communities first. It has been an absolute privilege to spend the week listening (really listening, with a total focus that can be hard to achieve sometimes day to day), to teacher leaders from across Scotland. The commitment to, ambition for, and enthusiasm about our young people and this project have been, in all honestly, quite humbling. I am very fortunate. We are very fortunate.

Another important piece of work which has been undertaken this week is the personalisation and choice process for MGS pupils who will be starting S3 with us. Thanks go to Mr Valentine and the team at MGS for the time spent supporting young people and their families in exploring the Personal Pathways and what these mean for them in terms of providing a meaningful culmination of their Broad General Education and linking into their future senior phase. MGS parents can contact the WLCTransitions@edubuzz.org email address if they have any remaining queries, and Mr. Valentine will pick these up. He reported that by far the most common word used by young people was to describe how they were feeling right now was ‘Excited!’, with ‘BUZZING!’ also worth an honourable mention.

Of course, we also recognise that some young people will be feeling a real mix of emotions, including some nervousness or worry. We have been working hard to further shape the transition plan for the summer term with our partner schools, and will be in a position to share the details behind this by early March. We are so looking forward to having time to spend with our young people exploring our shared ways of being at the campus.

I’d also like to draw your attention to our next Parent Engagement opportunity. We will be hosting a ‘Meet the Senior Leadership Team’ Google Meet from 7pm-8pm on Thursday 16^th March. Young people are also welcome to ‘attend’. This is a chance to start put faces to names, and to learn a little bit more about our roles. If you have particular topics you would like us to cover or questions you would like us to answer, these should be submitted in advance to WLCTransitions@edubuzz.org with the title ‘Meet the SLT’. To allow time for full responses to be considered, please submit these by close of business on Tuesday 14^th March.

Video call link for 7pm on Thursday 16^th March: Meet the SLT

We will also be providing some in person opportunities in May and June- more to come on that in the next few weeks.

Thanks go to all in our school community who completed our school dress code survey, which gathered well over 100 individual responses from parents/carers, and almost 100 from our young people. It was actually very encouraging to see a lot of agreement between the groups!

The summary comments on the survey can be accesses here: Dress Code Summary Data

Once we have done the remaining work on the school crest (it’s coming!), we will pull all of this guidance together for ease of reference. We will also discuss all of this further in the transition programme.

I do hope that you are all able to enjoy some family time over the February break.

 

Firstly, some excellent news with regards to our Severe and Complex Needs provision. We now have a preferred candidate for the post of DHT (ASN). Mrs Sarah Fleming is currently the Acting DHT at Saltersgate school in Midlothian, and brings a wealth of experience from both mainstream and specialist school provisions. We hope she will be able to join us for the whole of the summer term, in order to support transition in partnership with our families.

As we head closer to the school opening, it is natural that a few questions have come up from our community regarding the planning around safeguarding in a building of this scope and scale. It is therefore a good time to bring some of these queries together. I hope that the following supports you in building a picture of how we will move forward with this crucial area of work.

I currently chair a sub group of the Campus Board, which has the specific role of planning for the use of the building by organisations other than education. Although this work is ongoing, the following has been established:

The school (including SCN provision) will be the only organisation fully operational in the building in August 2023.

Other partners will gradually ‘move into’ the building over a period of several months. This means there will be sufficient time to set up, monitor and evaluate user protocols with one partner at a time.

Once the building is open, we will form a Partnership Board, to ensure that there are regular meetings between all partners.

This will allow us an ongoing focus on overall health and safety, as well as a very specific focus on safeguarding. As Head of Establishment as well as Head of the School, I will chair this Board.

There are no immediate plans for any organisations beyond education to use areas serving the school during the school day.

It is possible that this could change in the longer term as we develop the Partnership Board and get to know the building better. All of our partners are fully supportive of our staged approach.

With regards to the building design, please note the following:

The building incorporates as range of ‘zones’ which are accessed through swipe card controls.

For example, someone who attends an event in the Community wing of the building would not be able to access the main school building without being granted access. The only exception to this is through a couple of fire doors that are required by building control. However, these are alarmed and would alert facilities management staff immediately to any attempted breach.

The main ‘school’ entrance leads to a secured area, which includes the school office.

To proceed any further than this, a visitor would need to be ‘swiped’ in to the main atrium and beyond.

This leads on to the links between the school Dress Code and supporting safety and security. Thank you to those of you who have already given your responses to proposed Dress Code items. These items have been suggested with multiple factors in mind, not least pupil feedback on the importance of shared identify being maintained alongside a Dress Code that enables them to take part in practical learning in a safe and comfortable way.

We plan to ensure that pupils have the option of a number of items in school colours and/or with the school crest, making them easily identifiable as members of the school community. However, both pupils and parents asked that we be mindful of the cost of the school day and also accept plain black jumpers, trousers, skirts etc. It is of course important to reduce what barriers we can to accessing education, so this seems like a sensible approach. Those of us with teenagers will also be aware of how often the school clothes can get delayed on their way to the washing machine, so back-ups are always good!

In relation to this, it is worth mentioning at this stage some planning around pupil access to the different ‘zones’ previously mentioned. We are currently working towards each pupil being issued with a swipe card on a WLC lanyard; equivalent to what many of us, including teaching staff, have for our place of work. This will allow pupils to move swiftly and safely between zoned areas, and provide an extra layer of security in terms of identifying any unwanted visitors. Allocating the WLC lanyards will also support easy pupil identification and make it clear who belongs in the school, whether the young person is wearing plain black or school crest item as part of their Dress Code.

Please note: The final Google survey for this half term, on the school crest, was originally due to be shared next week. However, a couple of our partner schools have asked for extra time for young people to complete their versions of the survey. It is important that we give this opportunity so that we have as many as possible contributing their ideas on the school name/Houses names, and vision and values. To this end, please bear with us as we bring that data together throughout February. Further information on the school crest survey will follow.

Our next phase of recruitment is now well underway and our young people have once again risen to the challenge of supporting this. I visited Pinkie St. Peter’s this week where P7 pupils worked with me to generate questions for the upcoming Curriculum Leader interviews. I really admired their clear focus on kindness, inclusion, and relationships in the classroom. I also very much enjoyed the fact that they arrived with a bunch of questions they had for me, so I have added to the Pupil FAQ section on the website accordingly. The direct link is here: Pupil FAQs

‘Will you bring your dog to visit the new school?’ goes down as my favourite Pupil Voice question ever.

With our timetable now largely devised the next adverts to go out will be for classroom teachers. I will continue to include updates here, and our staff list on the website is amended regularly to reflect the emerging picture: WLC Draft Staff List

In continuing to learn from other schools, I visited West Calder High School this week. Both the staff and the young people there were very clear about the importance of everyone in the community understanding the relationship between the spaces that have been created and the learning and teaching that goes on in them. I am hugely grateful to the HT, Greg McDowall, for pulling together a full day’s programme that gave me a real sense of the school. I particularly appreciated one of the S6 pupils reminding me to make sure I have enough bins, as one of her strongest memories of moving to the new school was always struggling to find one! Duly noted.

There was a busy site visit this week with Mr Valentine, Mrs Stewart-Young and Ms O’Neill all getting their first proper look at our new home. We are already working hard as a team to consider how we will create a safe, secure space that welcomes all of our learners, and doesn’t feel overwhelming. We were also joined by guests from the University of Edinburgh, who are supporting me through the completion of my Masters in Leadership and Learning this year. My current research project is focused on the work I am doing in developing a professional learning programme for our new senior and middle leaders. They found it really helpful to be able to picture the building I have been reflecting on in our course discussions more accurately, and were particularly envious of my beautiful corner office which, like much of the building, has developed significantly every time I look. Our first SLT phot is on Twitter @MsPrestonHT

The Google Form on Vision and Values is currently open and I hope you can take the time to make a note of the vocabulary you would most like to see. So far, there has been a lots of focus on wellbeing, positivity and responsibility. Once our senior leadership team has started, we will start to share some ideas on how we will turn these into clear vision and values statements.

One of the reasons that this project is so exciting is, if course, because of how unusual it is. Most ‘new schools’ are in fact new buildings, which take existing school populations and place them in better facilities. Others happen as the result of schools amalgamating, bringing staff from two or three school together. It’s especially unusual at secondary level to go from the ground up, which is why I sought out the only school in Scotland which has been through a similar process recently; Bertha Park High School, in Perth.

I am very grateful that the HT there dedicated a full morning this week to showing me round and talking openly and authentically about what he felt had been the risks worth taking, and what he would do differently if he had his time again. It was hugely encouraging to know we are all absolutely on the right lines in terms of our planning and the importance of focusing on:

• Routines, routine, routines
• Creating safe spaces within epic scales
• Going digital
• Connecting authentically with the community
• Learning to walk before you try to run!

We plan to maintain the relationship between the schools moving forward. Bertha Park now has pupils up to S5 so watching their senior phase develop will be particularly beneficial.

Now that we are in 2023, the next stage of transition planning in underway. I met with both Mr Valentine and Ms Hannan at MGS this week to look at the specific support needed for our new S2 and S3 and am grateful to the team there for their continued commitment to getting it right for all of our young people. Mr Valentine will take a lead on Personal Pathways for the new S3, as well as beginning to work on one page profiles which will give the young people the opportunity to share what they think is most important about them.

Mr Valentine will also be visiting Pinkie St. Peter’s Parent Council this week to make initial introductions, and will follow this up with introductions to the Wallyford Parent Council in line with planned meetings. I provided some updates to the Wallyford Parent Council this week, including some images of the building’s progress.

All parents access the presentation here: Parent Council Update January 2023

Mrs Stewart-Young now has a confirmed start date of 16^th March and we hope to offer a Google Meet thereafter to ensure that as many parents as possible are able to start putting names to faces!

I also had the privilege of hosting one to one meetings with parents whose young people will be joining the SCN provision in August. Many are keen to firmly establish a sense of unique identity for the provision and we’ll be looking to name this in line with the eventual decision we make on the name of the school as a whole.

Your support in completing the Google Forms on this and other topics is much appreciated and it’s been very interesting to see just how wide the range of opinions is. There are a couple of favourites starting to emerge!