Headteacher blog 9th October 2020

Attendance has been good this week despite everything going on, and classes seem happy and settled. The weather has been autumnal and so we do need wellies, especially for those year groups allocated to field zones.

With it being autumn, I thought that I would offer conkers on strings to the Y6 children that I usually supervise at lunchtime.  Most seem to have never played conkers before and they found it really difficult. Most couldn’t manage to hit their opponent’s conker, and those that did weren’t able to elicit any force. As a result, matches took too long to hold interest and the event fizzled out. Our children today may be able to do things we couldn’t as boys and girls in the 70s (or 90s for many of you!), but it does seem that the dexterity to launch a conker on a string has been lost and that’s a shame.

Earlier this week I met with a buildings consultant to try to put together a bid for government investment into the infant building to decarbonise heating. There’s a long way to go for the bid, but I do think it is so important to try to do as much as we reasonably can to reduce our fossil fuel consumption. We simply don’t have the money to do the capital investment required, so we need to be innovative and look for support wherever we can.  On a related matter, governor Ruth Fain worked (virtually) again with current Year 6 to look at pollution around school, using data gathered from sensors put up with the children when they were in Year 5. The good news is that NO2 levels were within safe guidelines across the  school site despite the proximity of the ring road, and our tree-planting plans for next March should improve things further.