Headteacher’s blog 6th September 2019

It is great to be back in school! We had a rush to be ready in the juniors as we have had new heating installed in almost all the classrooms and had to clear all the rooms. Sadly, our re-roofing project for the infants was postponed at the last moment and that work is carried over to next summer.

We welcome lots and lots of new staff to the school this year and we have a big job of induction: maintaining the best qualities of Farfield and welcoming new ideas and skills into the team. We had a great response to our Parent Survey at the end of last year and it has provided us some areas to consider and work on in our new School Improvement Plan: thank you for your time responding to this.

This morning I took six Y5/6 children to an ‘Enviro-Forum’ at Horsforth Golf Club to meet and work with Stuart Andrew MP. We were discussing Climate Change and ideas for individuals, the council and government. The children had good awareness and had interesting ideas. They all spoke confidently and clearly in front of an audience of other schools. I was well-behaved and restrained (for me), only interjecting a few times! On my way out, a fellow head did thank me for interrupting when the MP appeared to be suggesting that China was the biggest problem (appearing, at the time, to be focusing on overall emissions without an historic or per capita perspective, and without taking into account the ‘out-sourcing’ of much of our manufacturing). To his credit, Stuart Andrew didn’t have to organise this event and didn’t make any explicit political points during the session: he did appear to be in listening mode after a challenging week in parliament.  I do think we should act with much more urgency on this issue and we will be looking to markedly improve the sustainability of the school over the next two years. A big challenge will be reducing reliance on gas for heating…