Headteacher Blog 6th October 2023

It’s been warm but more autumnal this week. It is time to enforce the welly rule on the grounds for juniors as it is suddenly very wet and muddy in places. It is also important that all juniors have indoor shoes to change into.

Provision for children with SEND is in the news this week, with current and former Farfield parents involved in a protest about specialist places in Leeds this week. I don’t think the protest was particularly referring to Farfield – our school’s provision for SEND will be highly praised in the forthcoming OFSTED report. There is a problem in Leeds and across the country in terms of demand outstripping rising funding. I was surprised, though, that the report did not reference the £24million of High Needs Block funding for SEND that Leeds has been deprived of since 2018 due to ‘gains limits’ as we move glacially towards a full implementation of a national funding formula for schools. SEND spending in Leeds is projected to over-shoot budgets by tens of millions of pounds over the next few years and there could be some more difficult funding decisions to come. The number of specialist places will increase, but demand may still out-strip this. Meanwhile, a chronic lack of educational psychologists is also delaying our school from being able to access the right provision for some of our children.

Last weekend, some of our children entered the season’s first city-wide cross country at Middleton Woods. Lots of children have been practising at school and we hope to have a really good series of races. Our chair of governors is always at these races and she reported:

“Everyone ran their best races today and – finally – we had a team in every category!! Yr5/6 boys were incredible in a team of seven and all the other teams did brilliantly: some super high scores and lots of smiles. And the sun shone!