Dear Parent/Carer,
Farewell for now to our Year 11 and Year 13 students
We had our traditional Year 11 Leavers’ assembly yesterday and as I reflected upon the last few months, I felt very proud of the way in which our students applied themselves consistently throughout the year. Our Year 11 students are our first fully fledged ‘Jesmond Park Academy’ students to graduate from Year 11 as they started Year 7 in September 2019 when Jesmond Park Academy was first officially established. Parents/Carers may remember the Jesmond Park Academy tote bags!
The GCSE and A Level exams finally concluded this week and I have been extremely impressed with our Year 11 and Year 13 students who have conducted themselves impeccably throughout. I am looking forward to our final farewell in school next week to our Year 13 students at our Leavers’ assembly on Thursday. Again, it will be another event where I will feel incredibly proud of our fabulous students. Our final farewells do not end there though as we have both our Year 11 and Year 13 proms to look forward to on Friday 28th June at the Discovery Hall and the Assembly Rooms respectively.
We are very much looking forward to celebrating some well-deserved incredible GCSE and A Level results at our results days in the summer. Year 13 results day is Thursday 15th August and Year 11 results day is Thursday 22nd August. We will write to parents/carers with further details of these days. I would also like to say a huge thank you to the staff at JPA who have worked hard to support the students and, of course, to parents/carers who have helped support their children through the challenging times in the lead up to and the duration of the exam season.
Staff Training Day – Wednesday 26th June 2024
A reminder the school will be closed to all students on Wednesday the 26th of June for staff training day.
Sixth Form Bridging Week – Monday 22nd June – Friday 28th June
Many of our Year 11 students will be shortly returning to JPA for their Bridging Week into Sixth Form. This is an important transition event, and really helps students engage with Sixth Form and develop an early understanding of the course, so they can ‘hit the ground running’ in September. If you do not think your child is enrolled on the Bridging Week and is keen to return to JPA Sixth Form, then please contact the Sixth Form team to discuss.
Parent VLE
IT staff at Jesmond Park Academy have been working hard to produce a portal on the FROG VLE to continue to improve and enhance how we communicate with parents and carers, and we have recently released our Parent and Carer Portal. The new portal will allow parents to report student absence; access students' homework assignments and timetables; keep up to date with all events and notices and access all key information among many other features. To make it more accessible to all parents the portal also has a translation facility.
We are also encouraging everyone to download the MyFrog App (a link to this is on the Parent Carer portal detailing how to login etc.) which will provide immediate notifications of assignments and key messages. Parents and Carers will continue to receive Text and Email messages as before but if you want to keep up to date with the day-to-day life of the school the MyFrog App could be the perfect way to do this alongside our social media channels. You should receive details on how to logon in the coming weeks if you haven’t already done so.
Pre-Owned School Uniform Wednesday 17th July & Thursday 18th July 3:30pm – 5:00pm
The Parents’ Forum felt strongly that we should provide a bigger focus on the recycling of our current school uniform from our current student body. This is both for environmental reasons and also to help with the cost of living. We have done this successfully in the past but this year, we are hoping to be bigger and better. During the week commencing Monday 8th July we would like students to drop off donations of no longer required or outgrown uniform and PE kit. They can simply do this at the year group door as they enter the school. Year 11 students can still do this too either through younger siblings dropping the uniform off or simply dropping it off during taster sessions next week. We will then have two ‘pre-owned’ uniform collection nights for parents/carers on Wednesday 17th July and Thursday 18th July between 3:30pm and 5:00pm. Parents/carers are more than welcome to collect up to 10 items per child. Again, we really feel this will have an impact for both environmental reasons to help with recycling of perfectly good uniform and to support with the ever-increasing costs of living.
Enrichment and Trips
I have been really pleased with our increased opportunities for enrichment activities this year during the school day, after school and trips away in this country and overseas. There are too many to mention them all here, but I wanted to give you a flavour of the diverse range of opportunities our students have experienced this year. We have seen visiting speakers (authors and playwrights), visiting drama performances, visits to local universities, visits to St James Park, Dance City, Newcastle Theatre Royal. We also have trips planned to visit the Galeon Andalucía on Spillers Quay, Kingswood Activity Centre amongst others before the end of term. We have had overseas trips to Disneyland Paris and skiing in Europe, D of E expeditions and a number of our Year 7 & 8 students are visiting France and a number of our Year 10 students are visiting China in the last week of term. We also have our ‘Day of Sport’ on Tuesday 9th July, ‘Yellow Week’ activity day and our annual ‘day of culture’ to look forward to before the end of term too. Next year we are continuing to further develop our enrichment opportunities. In addition to our now established oversees trips we are also planning a Sixth Form trip to CERN’s Hadron Collider Site in Geneva, Switzerland. Opportunities within Performing Arts continues to grow. Last night a number of our students performed in Romeo and Juliet at the Peoples Theatre as part of the Heaton School’s Shakespeare festival. Our students were magnificent. Next Thursday we have a large number of our students performing a Dance showcase at Gosforth Civic Theatre. Another date for your diary is our Summer Performing Arts showcase taking place in school on Thursday 11th July at 5:30 pm. Further details can be found on our school website. As always, if you think that you could support our enrichment offer to students (or indeed have contacts who you think can) please contact Nigel Holmes who is one of our Deputy Principals and he oversees our wider enrichment programme (nholmes@jesmondparkacademy.org.uk).
Year 10 Work Experience Monday 15th July – Thursday 18th July
Year 10 parent/carers will be aware of our commitment to ensuring that as many of our Year 10 students as possible secure a placement for this week. The overwhelming majority of our students have now secured a placement, but we are very aware of the difficulties around supporting your child finding a placement if you have not yet been able to find one. If you still need help either finding a placement or recording the placement on our Unifrog careers platform then please contact Sarah Beeley (sbeeley@jesmondparkacademy.org.uk) or Lorraine Aspinall (Laspinall@jesmondparkacademy.org.uk) who will be happy to help. We are asking that all students have recorded their placements on Unifrog by Monday 1st July. There will be no normal Year 10 lessons running during WEX week, for those Year 10 students who have been unable to secure a placement we will be running an in school ‘skills & employability week’.
School Meal Prices
From September 2024, all school meals across the Gosforth Group Academies will be provided by Newcastle City Council. As you will already be aware, food prices have been rising for some time now and this has inevitably led to increasing pressure on the cost of providing the school meals service. We have now reached the point where, to meet these increasing costs and to standardise pricing across the Trust, the price of a school meal from 1st September 2024 will be increasing to £2.60.
Year 6 Transition Evening
Just to let everyone know that we had a superb Transition Evening on Tuesday night, which was well attended by supportive parents. Parents had the opportunity to listen to a presentation about the forthcoming transition days, the start of the new term in September and order uniform. There were some excellent speeches about the school from our current Year 7 students and the musical contributions throughout the evening were outstanding. Transition is so important for a successful start to the new year, and we have been working hard with Primary Schools to make sure we have a great understanding of our new intake. We have increased the amount of Transition days in the penultimate week to 3, so Year 6 students can spend some quality time in the school so that they do not feel any anxiety over the summer.
Sport at JPA
Our sports teams have been busy and extremely successful throughout the year as you will have seen through our regular updates via social media. It is particularly pleasing at this time of year to see such a thriving key stage three cricket club, the girls being especially successful whilst the boys are preparing for their first fixture against St Mary's school. Our best athletes have been competing in the Newcastle Schools athletics competitions with many students qualifying to represent their city in the county competitions. Well done to all. Sport of course is not just about elite performance often the best events are all about fun, fitness and making friends, we will be fully embracing the mass participation principal when all of our students will take part in sports day on 9th July.
Best wishes for the remainder of the term. I will write again in the forthcoming weeks with a final newsletter including confirmed details of our results days and our return to school in September.
Yours faithfully,
STEVE CAMPBELL
PRINCIPAL