Dear Parents and Carers,

I hope you have all had a lovely summer break with your children and were able to enjoy the sunshine (when it appeared …). The holidays seem to have flown by and we are now at the start of another school year.

Over the summer holidays, we completed all the legal formalities needed to convert the school from grant maintained into an Academy. We received the conversion order from the Secretary of State for Education, and officially joined the Primary QuEST MAT on the 1st of September, as planned. We are looking forward to getting the benefits of working closely with Primary QuEST and the other local primary schools in the MAT. Stephen Dean, the CEO of Primary QuEST, will no doubt meet many of you over the coming months. He is an ex-primary school head teacher and is really passionate about education; we have been working closely with him and his team for over a year now.

Our amazing PTFA team have been busy over the summer holidays, getting the groundworks in place in the playground to replace the old trim trail with new equipment. Thank you to Zoe Gifford and the team for raising the funds, and for giving up their time in the holidays too. The final stage, is for a specialist Company to install the safety surfacing and equipment itself. Once this is complete we will do a grand reveal. The children are all very excited about it!

Thank you for your cooperation with the new drop off procedure, which started on Tuesday. The children seem very calm in the mornings and we are pleased with how it’s working. Our local neighbours have already commented on how much less disruptive the early morning traffic is with a faster turn-around of cars.

We are all set up for the new year, the school is looking great and I witnessed Mrs Wilson and many of the team in over the holidays getting it tidy and ready for your children’s return. The team really are looking forward to the new term and their new classes.

Kind regards

Neil Kinlay

Chair Of Governors