Headteacher's Update

Dear Parents and Carers

It has been another wonderful week in school. We welcomed our Danish Partner school and Year 10 buddies have been amazing at making them feel welcome. We also had our open evening last night and it was wonderful to begin to meet the next generation of Hope Valley College students. Over 550 people came to look around and find out more about our school and community.

We are now halfway through this term, and we have spent this week talking to our students in assembly about excellence and for the need to pursue this in everything that we do. Next week will have a focus on consistent routines around uniform and mobile phones. It is a year ago that we started our consultation about changing our phone policy and it has made such a difference to school life. We will keep reminding young people next week about the need to have phones switched off in bags, so that they can focus.

Extra-curricular activities are fully up and running in school and we are encouraging students to take part in these opportunities. Below are some photos from our amazing outdoor activity programme as we make use of our surroundings.

New Attendance Procedures

As you are aware, frequent absences have a serious effect on academic progress. All parents and carers have a legal responsibility to ensure that their children attend school regularly.

Alongside our continual monitoring of attendance, we have a formal review of attendance every 4 weeks, particularly for those students whose attendance is less than 97%. This provides an opportunity for regular communication and support to improve attendance. Please be assured that our aim is prevention and support, as working together to support your child to access education is always the main objective and the earlier this happens, the more effective it is.

This year we will be notifying parents when their young person's attendance starts to fall; this is to raise awareness and enable us to intervene quickly to ensure that everything is in place to support good attendance. Thank you for your support.

What’s going on in school:

Our Year 9 Outdoor Activities sessions began last Friday with a mountain biking session. Students practiced on our own pump track, before heading over to Hope park to test out their skills.

Football teams from Y7 and y8 travelled to St Philip Howard school on Wednesday this week. This is the first time our Year 7 team have played together and they worked well to bond as a team, bunt unfortunately lost the match. Year 8 just missed out on a win against a very evenly matched team from the other school. They also worked very well as a team. Well done to all involved.
A huge thank you to all our students who helped out at our Open Evening. They all did an amazing job as ambassadors for our school. Here are a few pictures from the evening: