Newsletter 29 Mar 2007

Thank you to all parents and friends of the school who came to our Easter Assembly. We all enjoyed the special ‘off timetable’ day on Tuesday where older children worked with younger children to look afresh at the Easter story.

This half term has been encouraging in many ways. As a result of our recent Open Day, six new students will begin with us in school after Easter with another two in the pipeline to be added to the September intake. Praise God for this provision of new families to work with.

We have also received a number of gifts amounting to approx £1,500 from various individuals and churches. One of the Romanian groups went to Mooreside Fellowship to practice their skills in working with young children and received a gift for Romania. John Mitchell has been employed by the school this year seeking funds for the development of the school. We have received our first major amount for specific funding to the tune of £3,000. Again we thank God for this provision.

Dr Mark Pike, one of our parents and a school governor, and myself are attending the Association of Christian Schools over the Easter Break. We are both contributing seminars at the conference on topics we have developed and shared with you at Bradford Christian School.

The T & A’s education reporter Dan Webber came to interview myself and our Head Boy Josh Lee and Head Girl Natalie Moody yesterday. Read the T & A over the next few days to see what our Ofsted write up is like. I tried to engage the journalist with the idea that the unfavourable image of faith schools held by some and promoted by the media on occasions is untrue and unfair. Let’s pray that they report about us in a decent and favourable light.

Finally, after the Easter break, we will look forward to the new term with you. Please put an important date in your diary. As many of you know, Mr Barton will be leaving us at the end of next term. We have been praying about a number of important changes to the shape and running of the school. Our careful planning is nearly complete and we are excited to invite you to an Annual Partnership type meeting on Tuesday 15th May. This meeting will be instead of the normal September meeting. The time is right to share a number of important new initiatives that we will need to be together in.

Work Experience – Year 10

This years work experience fortnight has once again been a success, but in many different ways. There was disappointment where placements didn’t work out or the roles that students completed were not what they expected, but there were also successes. Not all placements are going to be interesting and absorbing and it was interesting to talk to one of the students who went out to work with electricians who was very constrained by the health and safety laws. And rightly so, but it did make it difficult for him to fully experience the role. He made the best of the situation though by talking to the other engineers and gradually built up a trust that enabled him to hold ladders and pass equipment, which in the first days was not allowed. There are other huge successes of a student who went to a pharmacy expecting to stock shelves and maybe look over someone’s shoulder and he was given full reign to try all the roles within the pharmacy. Fully supervised and checked of course but this has given the student a greater insight into wider career opportunities that he had not considered before.

We had students in placements with childcare, plumbers, garages, restaurants, photographers and bakeries. On a personal note I was involved with three of the students, one was working on my extension at home and had a go at a wide range of tasks from pointing to knocking off pebble dashing. Two other students came to work with me at the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, they were surprised that an office job had such variety and were impressed with the experience that they had. As manager I was impressed with the work that they did and their section managers were quick to point out that they were contributing to the work place. Many of our students received some form of reward from their employers for the time that they spent with them and some of them were offered future employment.

Overall the arrangement of this two week event takes a huge amount of planning and clerical work, but on speaking to all the students at the end of their time in the work place they all felt that it was a worthwhile addition to the curriculum. Many felt that they had gained in confidence from the time they spent in the adult world of work. We are continually looking at how to improve our work experience programme and this year we used some books prepared for us by the Bradford Work Experience unit to help the students prepare for their two weeks out of school and also to record their own thoughts and those of their employers and teachers. This has been a valuable addition to the way in which we prepare students for the workplace and will prove useful to them in the future where they asked the employer to record a reference for them. I have asked all the employers involved to provide feedback for the students and where that has been forthcoming will be sending this home for parents to view in the next week.

In preparation for next year’s placement, we look forward to meeting with parents in order to establish a realistic set of expectations. Due to stringent health and safety legislation, there are certain experiences students will not legally be allowed to have by way of hands on involvement. It must also be stated that students will be exposed to ordinary working folk! They will experience choice language and calendars of flimsily clad women in garage workshops…as one student put it, “I had to get used to the subtleties of the ‘fag break’ very quickly”

Zeilah Chadwick, Work Placements Officer