Headteacher blog 6th May 2016

It has been an unusual week with an historic first ‘strike’ by some of our families in support of the ‘Let our kids be kids’ campaign. About 12 children were kept off school on Tuesday, with many other families writing to me in support of the campaign’s aims. The basic thrust of the campaign is that there is too much pressure and focus on assessments at too early an age in English schools, and I am inclined to agree. At Farfield, we try to balance this with a rich and exciting curriculum but it is certainly a challenge with high-stakes school accountability based upon test results.  We can only hope that pressure and opposition from teaching unions and, now, parents can combine to produce some future concessions and rebalancing.  Next week, we have the formal Y6 SATs and we would like to wish all our children the best of luck with these new assessments. The grammar questions are particularly challenging; Schools’ Minister Nick Gibb was caught out by one of the sample questions (4mins 20secs) live on Radio 4 earlier this week!

The great weather has been very welcome this week as 1S visited Rodley Nature Reserve and half of 5B went mountain biking at Herd Farm with Chris Young from British Cycling. We also had our football team at the West Leeds finals as champions of the local area.