Welcome Back Letter Start of 2021-2022

Welcome to a new academic year at Holcombe Grammar School.

 It has been such a joy this week to welcome our students back into our community. After an incredibly disrupted academic year last year, it has been wonderful to see all the students back as a full school community again. It has also been lovely to see our new classrooms, new computer room, refurbished hall and brand new 6 th form centre open and alive with young people. Things are not yet fully back to normal of course, but we are heading in the right direction and I think we all feel cautiously optimistic about the year ahead.

With this in mind, I have been speaking in my assemblies this week about our five main priorities for the coming year and I thought it would be useful to share them with you:

1.  Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – we are a 21st century school preparing young people for life in the modern world. There is absolutely no place in this community for any outdated values. Therefore, we will be working hard this year to continue to promote and celebrate the diverse community that we have in the school. Unfortunately, we know that on occasions discriminatory behaviour does occur and we will be working hard to educate our students about this to ensure our community is truly one for all of us.
2. Mastery, Endeavour, Thinking – these values have been at the heart of the school for several years now but we are looking to revitalise them this year. Our students will work hard this year to become masters of their learning and as ever we are extremely proud to be a member of the Thinking Schools Academy Trust and will continue to develop our students cognitive abilities
3. Challenge in our curriculum – our students are very able students and, as such, should be consistently challenged by our curriculum. Now we are largely back to normal we will be ensuring that all of our students are given work that stretches them so that they maximise their ability. We are also continuing to develop our curriculum offer with drama returning to the school curriculum in Years 7 and 8 this year and new subjects on offer to our 6th form students.
4.  Cultural Education – COVID deprived us of so many opportunities to expand students cultural experiences and it is our sincere hope that this year we can do much more in this area. So look out for news soon about trips, extra-curricular clubs, music and drama opportunities, charity work, guest speakers coming in to school and much more.
5. Year 11 and Year 13 – after two years with no actual GCSE and A level examinations taking place in the traditional manner, we have to prioritise our Year 11 and Year 13 students this year. We will ensure they are as prepared as they can be for the summer 2022 examinations which at the moment we expect will be going ahead. At this precise time we still do not have final details from government as to what these examinations will look like and how they will be different from previous years. All I can say is that as soon as this information is received we will ensure that we pass it on to our Year 11 and 13 students and parents.These are our five main priorities for this year and we are very hopeful that we will have a much less disrupted year than we had last year.

However, the COVID pandemic is still very much with us so again can I ask all parents:

• Please do not send your child to school if they are unwell, especially if they have the classic COVID symptoms (high temperature, cough, loss of smell or taste)
• Please ensure that if your child does have symptoms, they stay at home and book a PCR test. Should this test be positive then your child needs to stay off school for 10 days, but should this be negative then they may return to school immediately. 
• Please ensure your children are completing Lateral Flow tests at home, twice a week. The government have said they will review this advice at the end of September, but for now we need students to keep doing this to ensure that we keep any positive cases out of school. We have a good supply of these testing kits at school, so if your child runs out please ask them to collect a replacement kit from the main office.

If we have a student in school who is ill and seems to have symptoms of COVID, we will contact you immediately and arrange for them to be sent home so that a PCR test can be arranged. In line with new government policy though, we are now not sending home any close contacts of any positive cases, or suspected cases, unless specifically told to do so by NHS Track and Trace. I would also like to remind you that the two gates in use this year are as follows:

• Years 7, 8 and 9 need to use the Maidstone Road entrance
• Years 10,11, 12 and 13 need to use the Letchworth Avenue entrance

Please can we remind all parents to be very considerate when parking to drop off or collect children, especially on Maidstone Road, which gets very busy at drop off and pick up times

We value the positive relationships that we have with you as parents so please continue to contact us at school if you have any queries. We can now meet face to face again so staff may invite you back in to school to meet with us if appropriate. However please can I remind you not to turn up and expect to see a member of staff immediately, as it may well be that the person you need is not available at that time.

This is a good time to also remind all parents that our parents evenings this year will remain as ‘virtual’ events, as we received a large amount of positive feedback about these last year. Whilst we may miss the face-to-face meetings of old, we will certainly not miss the queuing, the frantic movement between rooms, the noise, the lack of parking and so on. More information will be issued about these online evenings in due course.

In the meantime, the primary contact for you remains your child’s Form Tutor. If you have any queries, please contact them in the first instance either via email or a note in the planner. For more specific queries that you wish to address to other staff, please email or call the main school office who will be pleased to help you.

Finally, this link below will take you to the page on our website that has all the key dates for the coming year.

https://www.holcombegrammar.org.uk/about/term-dates/

I look forward to sharing further news with you as this year progresses, primarily through our fortnightly blog. In the meantime, I hope you have found this update useful and I wish you and your families an enjoyable weekend.

Yours sincerely,

Mr L.Preston

Principal

Holcombe Grammar School