Dear Parent/Carer,
I am writing to you at the end of a particularly stressful and frustrating half term. Despite having a wonderful start to the year, the school closure over the last fortnight has abruptly halted our momentum. You will have read the updated information, via our website, from our Trust yesterday explaining the situation that we are now in and the complexities associated with it. Nevertheless, we are acutely aware that all that you want is for children to be back in full time education. We realise the impact that this is having on the children, but also on the staff as well, who are relentlessly trying to continue with the delivery of their curriculum in extremely challenging circumstances. We are all desperate for this to be resolved as soon as possible.
Our remote learning package is now fully in place and this is a combination of live lessons and narrated PowerPoints. There are instructions for students relating to accessing remote learning on the closure information page on our school website. Some parents have been in touch to say how overwhelmed their children have been with the amount of work set by staff. I acknowledge that working from home can be very unsettling without face to face contact and interaction with teachers. Please reassure your child that all they can do is try their best to complete the work their teachers have set for them. They should work for about 40 to 45 minutes on each lesson then move on to the next lesson, or have a break or lunch, like they would normally do when working at home, regardless where they have got up to in the "lesson".
When combining the set work with live lessons please count each one as a whole session. Your child should not be doing more than six sessions in a day. As live lessons are open to a whole year group my best advice would be to try and plan the day so that they have a mixture of live lessons, narrated PowerPoints and quiet work - much like they would have in school. If you contact your child's year team they will inform your child's teachers that they have been finding things difficult so that staff can reflect that in their expectations of them going forwards. Finally please reassure your child that, upon their return to school, children will be given praise for the work they have completed, not planner comments for incomplete or missing work.
In other news, the Department of Education School League tables were released over the last week, and it was pleasing to see that Jesmond Park Academy was sitting 31st out of 135 schools across the North East, with a positive Progress 8 score of + 0.02. In the coming years we will strive to continue our improvements and move nearer to the top 10, which is where I want us to be. There is no Sixth Form Value Added measure due to teacher assessed grades when the students were in Year 11, but Fisher Family Trust have confirmed that our results were over a quarter grade higher than the national average which is very pleasing news. These results bode well for our future.
So, the only thing left to say is that I hope that you all have a pleasant half term and hopefully we will see all of our students back in school shortly. Thank you for sticking by the school during this difficult time and for the messages of support and understanding we have received over the past week.
Warm regards,
STEVE CAMPBELL
PRINCIPAL