It has been a while since I managed to get time to sit down and blog! School was very busy in the run up to half term with lots of fun events for the children to get involved with.
Last half term passed in a flash – I can’t believe we’re already in the final half term of the year! One of our first jobs of the half term was to appoint a new Assistant Head Teacher. After Ms Lowry left us last year to take up the headship of Yeadon Westfield Infant School, Mrs Hodgson was successful in gaining promotion to the post of Deputy Head Teacher at Tranmere Park. We wanted to establish exactly what our staffing needs would be for the next school year and decided to manage without an Assistant Head Teacher for the rest of this year and to appoint a new AHT for September 2015. We had a very strong field and the successful candidate was Mr Ben Sutton, currently Acting Deputy Head at Grange Farm Primary School. We’re really pleased he’ll be joining us here at Tranmere.
Our Year 6 students had their SATS tests to take and they really impressed us all with their focused and sensible attitude towards the test week. Some of the pupils had sat through 12 hours of tests in 4 days by the end of the week … hard to keep concentration when you need to remain focused for such a long time … but they did it! Well done to all the children – we’re 100% certain that you did as well as you possibly could.
Reception had a monitoring visit from a Local Authority moderator who was in school to check that our teacher’s understanding of Early Years assessment was sound – well done to the Reception Team who passed with flying colours.
Our Y4 residential to Malham was thoroughly enjoyed by all the children and the Tranmere team received a visit from a Local Authority Health and Safety assessor who graded our practice as ‘outstanding’ – well done to the Y4 staff and children.
Governors have been working with a Local Authority consultant to review our Sex and Relationships policy. The new recommendations were also discussed with Parent Forum who made some useful comments. I’ll be drawing up a new policy shortly which will be implemented from next year. Parent Forum have also had some useful input into our new End of Year Report format – as we have been working with a revised National Curriculum, we needed to adjust our report format – I hope you’ll find the new format more personal to your child which was our intention.
After setting the new school budget, we have committed £20,000 of our limited funds to improving the school environment: we will be replacing rotten timber classroom doors in KS1 and installing air conditioning units (requested by the School Council) in the Year 5 & 6 classrooms which do get very hot in the summer months. The remainder of the money will be spent on redecoration around the school – we have decorated most classrooms on a rolling programme over the last couple of years but some of the shared spaces are looking tired and in need of sprucing up. It’s very easy to spend £20,000!
As well as all this, we’ve had Sports Day (it didn’t rain!), Tranmere’s got Talent, various entry and exit points for topics, school trips … I said it was a busy half term! I’m trying to step up our use of Twitter so please follow us – @tranmerepark – for regular updates on what is going on in school.