Headteacher’s Bulletin – Monday 21st March

Dear Parents and Carers,

I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend, especially the welcome return of some sunshine.

As ever, life in school is extremely busy and families can get a full insight into this through the weekly Newsletter (edition 430 this week) which we send out each Thursday. In terms of brief reminders, I would point to the value of Period 6 attendance for Y11 and Y13 as well as flagging up the School Show which runs from Tuesday to Friday this week. There are still tickets remaining which can be purchased via ParentPay or from main reception at break and lunchtimes or on the door at performances. Performances are:

Tuesday 22 March, 7pm and Thursday 24 March, 7pm – CAST A
Wednesday 23 March, 4pm and Friday 25 March, 7pm – CAST B
Prices: Adult £5; Child/OAP £3; Family ticket £15

Head of Year Awards

Head of year Updates
Year 7 – Miss Kincell, Miss Powell and Miss Cooper
We have been so proud of so many students engaging in extra-curricular activities this week. We have lots of students in the school show Matilda and we know how tough rehearsals alongside school can be but you have been amazing, The Year 7 team will be attending on Tuesday and we can’t wait.

We have also had glowing feedback from the instructors from Bikeability, students have been listening well and representing our school beautifully whilst learning fundamental cycling skills.

Students on Friday had an extra special treat and attended some fantastic science extra-curricular, including a chemistry lecture watching experiments and then biology, where some students even got to hold snakes, cockroaches, and even a tarantula!

Well done to our Students of the Week:
ANn: Lucy Norman – Excellent, thoughtful contributions to form time discussion.
ASU: Lexi Meldrum – for making excellent and thoughtful contributions to the Ukraine prayers.
Bl: Alicia Thackway – Making a big effort to get positive comments and showing improvements.
Cy: Lily Anderson – for bringing lots of donations to the foodbank! Thank you
Gr: Keira Taylor – For being positive and early in the mornings!
Hf: Ellie Murphy – Cheerful, helpful and polite – always!
Hv: Gracjan Malecki- Always polite and helpful during form time
MLn: Summer Perry – For your sense of humour and for always being kind to others.
MPe: Ivan Linley – For being an excellent, dependable member of 7MPe
Mr: Alex Lines for his excellent form time contributions
SMf: Mia Lofthouse – For outstanding resilience in her school work and fantastic character in her friendship groups. Well done Mia!

Well done to our Head of Year Awards:
Iker Martinez-Chavana 7Bl – for always being kind and helpful to others. Well Done!
Charlie Roe 7MPE – for her fundraising efforts for the Little Princess Trust and Save the Children’s Ukrainian appeal. Well done Charlie. Charlie really wants to help support the children of Ukraine in some way and has decided that she will have her hair cut short to raise some money for them. Whilst doing this she is also having enough cut off so that she can donate her hair to the Little Princess Trust at the same time! Two charities will benefit from her efforts. If anyone would like to support Charlie her just giving link is here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/charlieroe101

Library Newsletter
We celebrated St Patrick’s Day on Thursday by having a selection of worksheet activities such as crossword puzzles, working out on a number sheet where the pot of gold was, colouring pages and a match the joke to the punchline sheet. These worksheets were put out alongside the usual activities that we partake in during our Thursday Lunchtime of Calm. If you didn’t make it and want to have a go at the guess the punchline activity, just open the link: https://www.education.com/download/worksheet/120446/st-patricks-day-jokes.pdf

Recommendations
Keeping in with the Irish theme, some of our favourite authors are Irish. Eoin Colfer and Derek Landy to name but two.

Skulduggery Pleasant
Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy (Quiz R09795X2546. Level 4.9. Colour Purple) is the first book in a long series. We have placed it on the Horror Shelf, as the main character is described as; “With his sunglasses gone there was no denying the fact that he had no face. All he had was a skull for a head.”  However, the series could sit quite happily among other genres such as comedy, fantasy and mystery. Don’t let the fact that we’ve classed it as horror put you off reading it. “He was standing under the shade of a large tree, away from the crowd, the coat buttoned up all the way despite the warmth of the afternoon. A scarf was wrapped around the lower half of his face and even from her position on the far side of the grave, Stephanie could make out the wild and frizzy hair that escaped from the wide brimmed hat he wore low over his gigantic sunglasses. She watched him, intrigued by his appearance. And then, like he knew he was being observed, he turned and walked back through the rows of headstones, and disappeared from sight”. You can read the first three chapters by  opening the link: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Skulduggery_Pleasant/SoDAJpKZvaYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

Artemis Fowl
Artemis Fowl by Owen Colfer (Quiz 222623. Level 6.6. Colour Blue) is the story of a ruthless criminal mastermind, but he is only 12 years old!  Twelve-year-old criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl has discovered a world below ground of armed and dangerous—and extremely high-tech—fairies. He kidnaps one of them, Holly Short, and holds her for ransom in an effort to restore his family’s fortune. But he may have underestimated the fairies’ powers. You can read the prologue and chapter one by opening the link below: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Artemis_Fowl/n–nctZDw3AC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

York Book Awards
All your artwork, reviews, book scores and questions to the authors have now been sent. Six lucky students will be attending with myself and Miss Woolerton. I’ll let you hear all about it upon our return. Those of you who wish to borrow any books from the shortlist may do so, now that the final voting papers have been sent.

Year 8 – Mrs Avey, Mrs Mennell and Mr Handley
Firstly, we would like to inform parents and carers that attendance in Year 8 has yet again been the strongest in the main school (this is a regular occurrence). We are really grateful for the support we receive from parents and carers regarding attendance and that the importance of this is also emphasised at home.

This week our Act of Collective Worship as a year group was taken by 8ECe. The theme they chose was ‘Easter’ seeing it is close on the horizon. It was very clear that a lot of hard work went into this and every member has contributed in some way. The assembly focused on Easter. This included facts about the origins of Easter, Easter traditions around the world and also some of the negative impacts of Easter including worrying statistics on how much

This week in school it has been Science week and there has been some fun activities that some of our students have been able to become involved with. Some lucky students were able to take part in ZooLab as part of science week. This included a talk on a selection of different and exotic animals including millipede, a cockroach, a grass snake, a tarantula and a scorpion. It was excellent to see the students involved fully engaged, many being brave enough to hold a selection of the animals.

Science Week has also brought the AHS Science Lecture at the University. Several year 8 students gave up their time to act as guides for the evening which demonstrates. The students were very helpful on the night and engaged excellently with the lecture, even asking some very well thought out questions. We’d like to say massive thanks to these students – Suntornsawet, Livvie Curran, Kira Precious, Georgina Richardson, Mazin Khalifa, Isabella Schiller and Olivia Overhill-Cossu.

Our school librarian Miss Murphy has held a St Patrick’s Day competition on Thursday (17th) entered by a selection of Year 8s. The challenge was to complete different puzzles. Despite some strong attempts the winner of this was Stephanie Ajulo who has taken home the main prize – a plentiful amount of chocolate. Congratulations!

As ever, thank you for your continued support. If you have any issues regarding your child in Year 8, please do contact school reception to get in touch with Mrs Avey (Head of Year 8), Mr Handley (Assistant Head of Year 8) or Mrs Mennell (Year 8 Pastoral Support Worker).

Year 9 – Mr Arthur, Mr Deamer and Mrs Deacon
We have now reached the midpoint of the half term, with only a few short weeks remaining until a substantial break at the Easter holidays. Soon we will be embarking on the summer term with longer, brighter and warmer days – something that we can all very much look forward to! Students in Year 9 have really been leading the way in terms of our recent focus on the fundamentals, and this makes me very proud as a Head of Year.

I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate all of those Year 9 students performing in the Archbishop Holgate’s School production of Matilda this week. It is wonderful that we are able to put on a show for the first time in three years. Myself, Miss Deacon, and Mr Deamer will all be in attendance on Friday evening, and we are very much looking forward to cheering on all the wonderful and talented Year 9s in this performance.

As I have done in this bulletin previously, I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight the issue of attendance. Attendance at school is crucial to the success of students. Recent studies have shown that absence from school has a significant impact on the success of students, and can have a long-term impact through to their GCSEs. In one of these studies, it has shown that of those students that have 100% attendance, 79% of them achieve 5+ good GCSEs. At 95%, this figure falls to 69%. At 90%, this falls even further to 53%, and by 85% attendance, this figure for success becomes 36%. When considering that 5% attendance is around 7 days absence, it really is crucial that students are in school every single day. To put this into further context, if your child has lower than 95% attendance, this means that they are attending school less than the average child across the country.

As a school, we fully understand that there are appointments that cannot be moved, or emergencies that mean a child may have to take some time off school. However, wherever possible, please can non-emergency appointments be made outside of school time, or ensure that students return to school in the afternoon if their appointment is in the morning (or vice versa). With regards to illness, the message that has been given to students is that if they are feeling unwell, the question they should be asking themselves is not “Do I want to come into school?” Of course, if you’re feeling unwell the answer will be no! However, what they should be asking is, “Can I be in school?” In this instance, the answer is almost always “Yes”. We do have the Intervention Room for students that are feeling unwell, but we would very much appreciate your support in ensure your child is in school as much as possible to give them the best chance of success in the future.

Further to this, punctuality is also a key contributor to the success of students . It is important that students are sat in their form rooms ready to start the day before 8:45. This means that students must ensure they arrive on school site well before then – form rooms will be open from 8:30 for them to ‘drift in’ on a morning, and there are wellbeing resources available for when they arrive. This will also ensure that any important messages that are relayed to students during morning Tutor Time are given to all of the students. Furthermore, it is also vitally important that students arrive to lessons on time. Studies have shown that re-capping on old content through low-stakes testing is crucial to consolidating their learning. The first few minutes of a lesson is where most recaps take place. It is therefore vitally important that students arrive to lessons promptly and ready to learn to ensure they maximise the input that is given to them by teachers across all subjects.

This week, Year 9’s Act of Collective Worship was focused on careers as the previous week had been National Careers Week. For Year 9, the main focus was on STEM careers – related to science, technology, engineering and maths. Students were presented with lots of information about careers in the STEM field, and the benefits of following a path towards a STEM related career. For example, many of the world’s leading national superpowers are globally successful due to their proficiency and accomplishment in the STEM fields, and there are a wealth of careers in this area as a result. Modern discoveries and revelations in science, technology, engineering and maths are precisely what makes society progress and improve for the future. There is huge growth in the STEM sector as well, with the expectation that science, research, engineering and technology jobs will grow at double the rate of other occupations creating 142,000 jobs between now and 2023. Furthermore, we highlighted that women and girls are vastly underrepresented in STEM fields despite their talent and potential to be successful in these areas. Whilst women make up half of the population, they account for only 24% of the STEM workforce. In the UK, currently only 17% of jobs in the technology sector are held by women. We also linked STEM careers to our half termly British Values focus of ‘Individual Liberty’ – that we are lucky to have the right to an education, and the freedom to choose our own career path. Hopefully, through Year 9s ‘AHS Journey’ of ‘Understanding yourself and others’, students considered the relevance of STEM subjects to their own lives, and how the subjects may lead to a rich and rewarding career in the future.

Finally, a big congratulations to the students winning the Head of Year Award last week – they are…

Congratulations, and a £5 Amazon gift card will be on its way to you ASAP!

Thank you for taking the time to read this parent bulletin. If you have any issues regarding your child in Year 9, then please do get in touch by emailing aarthur@ahs.pmat.academy (head of Year), mdeacon@ahs.pmat.academy (Assistant Head of Year) and/or rdeamer@ahs.pmat.academy (Pastoral Support Worker); or alternatively, you can call Main School Reception and we will get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you.

Year 10 – Mr Avery, Miss Johstone and Miss Montagu
The sun has been shining this week (apart from Wednesday!) and it’s been really nice to see the students enjoying themselves playing football and chatting on the field. The good weather always seems to lift the mood around school and now Spring seems to be here. I hope we have more good days moving forward. I have spent the week popping into Y10 classes to keep an eye on their academic engagement and progress, and It was really nice to see the students working hard and engaging in their lessons. I keep reminding them in assembly that ‘hard work pays off’ and I hope they keep this in the forefront of their minds over the next couple of months before the mock exams.

It was really exciting to welcome the ‘speak out’ project into school this week. 25 lucky Year 10 students were selected to take part in the project, where they worked on their speech writing skills and ability to speak publicly. The expert who came in to train them was very impressed with their ability to write and speak passionately about a topic that was important to them, and impressed with the progress they made across the day. Hopefully this will provide the students with some important skills for later life and increase their confidence and resilience. We have another workshop booked for later in the year, so if you feel this is something that would interest your child please feel free to speak with a member of the Y10 team.

In this weeks Act of Collective worship we looked at the idea of being a feminist, and what this word means. We dispelled myths about the word, and explained the importance of equality in society between genders. The students we then taught about the evolution of feminism, and how women’s rights had made significant progress across the 20th century, but more was needed to be done even now in 2022. I was really pleased with the impact this had on our students, and enjoyed discussing the matter further with a few of them after the assembly.

A quick reminder about Work Experience –  if your child is still unable to find a work experience placement, please feel free to contact the school for assistance. We cannot call/email or arrange a placement for every student, but we can try and point you in the right direction. For example, I know for a fact the designer outlet is often a good place to find work experience, with students in the past going from shop to shop until they found a placement. Some students ended up getting a part time job out of this when they turned 16! I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that Work Experience is often about the skills students develop in a place of work, and not always about securing their ‘dream’ placement.

As always, should you have any worries or concerns about your child, please feel free to contact a member of the Y10 team. I hope all our families have a lovely weekend and enjoy the sunshine!

Year 11 – Miss Turvey, Miss Reeder and Miss Chambers
Thank you for your continued support as we reach the midway point of half term. We have had a lovely first week much helped by the arrival of some sunny weather which has given everyone a boost!

Parents Evening on Wednesday 30th March is fast approaching and we are very much looking forward to this important and informative evening. The evening will run from 3:45pm – 7:15pm and students should now be making appointments with their subject teachers. This will be a face-to-face event taking place in school and you will be welcomed to sign in via Main Reception. As usual, students are invited and encouraged to attend alongside their parents where possible – we appreciate that a small number of students will be away on a Drama trip.

We hope that everyone is able to attend Parents Evening and benefit from the important conversations taking place. Unfortunately, we cannot offer telephone appointments in place of face-to-face meetings as teachers won’t have access to phones or electronic devices during the directed time; any alternative contact made in place of missed appointments will be at the discretion of your child’s teachers. If you are unable to attend Parents Evening, please contact School Reception and let us know; we will do our very best to collate and communicate any important feedback. If you have any queries or concerns, please contact School Reception and ask to speak to the Y11 Team.

Our Assembly this week was an important one delivered by Mrs De Lashley, Head of Sixth Form, about Sixth Form options. Prior to Christmas, students submitted their Sixth Form applications and preferred subject choices. The Sixth Form team then create timetables around the subject choices students have made to try and ensure everyone is able to study their preferred options. This is always a complex and time-consuming process which unfortunately does not work for every student. Equally, there may be a small number of subjects that will not run if they haven’t generated enough interest. We understand that this can be disappointing; individual meetings have already been held with those students who have been most affected by this in advance.

Students have now received a letter detailing the option blocks and should indicate their firm options choices. Students should select ONE subject from EACH block (i.e. they would not be able to choose two subjects from Block A as the lessons for these will run at the same time). For subjects that appear in more than one option block, this means there is more than one class running for this subject and students can choose either to fit around their other options. If there are any unexpected clashes or disappointments, students should speak to their Form tutor in the first instance.

Sixth Form Subject Options:

Finally, if your child would like a Y11 Yearbook as part of their leavers package, payment can now be given to secure their order. Yearbooks cost £20 and there is now an option on parent pay to deposit this. The deadline for Yearbook payments will be Friday 25th March. This will be communicated to students through Form time next week; please do get in touch if you have any questions.

Thank you for your continued support. If you have any issues regarding your child in Year 11, please do get in touch with Miss Turvey (Head of Year 11), Miss Chambers (Assistant Head of Year 11) or Mrs Reeder (Year 11 Pastoral Support Worker) or contact school reception.

Post 16 – Mrs De Lashley, Mrs Walton, Miss Balmer and Mr Charlton
BTEC Winter Exam Results – Results for the external results will be made available to students on Thursday 24th March. We are holding an assembly on Monday to explain the process to students and outline next steps.  Each student will have a 1-2-1 meeting with a member of the Sixth Form Team on Thursday 24th March to discuss current position, resits and stand-down dates.

Sixth Form Challenge TRIPLE continues
Y13 – We are offering a prize for any student with 100% attendance between now and Easter
Y13 – we are offering a prize for any student with 100% attendance to P6 between now and Easter
Y12 – we are offering a prize for the most read books alongside a brief review on our National Book Tokens challenge

Y12 Parent’s Evening – Thank you for your attendance last week. It was a very positive evening and the one of many steps to ensure collectively we get the very best outcome for these young people. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Mrs Balmer cbalmer@ahs.pmat.academy

Y13 Leavers Celebration – Thank you for the reply slips coming in to confirm your attendance for this evening. We are delighted that the Archbishop of York has been able to accept our invitation to the evening (Thursday 19th May) and so we have moved the start time ever so slightly to accommodate (7pm-8pm). It is an honour and I hope you can join in celebrating you son/daughters.

Reminder: Y13 Mock Next Steps – Students will receive results over the next two weeks in class. These will help inform our next steps for intervention. If your son/daughter missed a mock they will be expected to complete them on their immediate return.

Shoutouts

Collective Worship
This week the theme of our Form Tutor Collective Worship is entitled Be Accepting. This is part of the Way Maker series. It will take us on a journey through Lent, reflecting on Jesus’ ministry and his example of being a “way maker” and serving others.

Quotes
Monday: “The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance.” – Christina Baker Kline; American novelist
Tuesday: “I think tolerance and acceptance and love is something that feeds every community.” – Lady Gaga; American singer, songwriter, and actress
Wednesday: “To make a difference, understand differences.” – Syed Sharukh, spiritual writer
Thursday: “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” – Mother Teresa; nun and Indian missionary
Friday: “The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.” – Brian Tracy; Canadian-American motivational speaker and author

The Wellbeing Newsletter Issue 47