Welcome back!

Dear families,

I hope you had a good half term break and your children have also enjoyed their first week - our staff certainly have. As you know, we are now sending our packed newsletter once a fortnight but I just wanted to send a brief welcome back message and highlight some of the exciting things we are looking forward to over the next 6 weeks. There are further Duke of Edinburgh hikes planned, and we will be hosting the next round of the inter-school debating competition. We will have more school council meetings to hear from the students what they want to see more (or less) of, and our next Awareness Afternoon will be on celebrating diversity and difference. Later in the term our inter-House competition is a talent show, when we will be able to enjoy the wealth of artistic, creative, musical and performance talent that we have amongst our students. As you know, our Sixth Form is thriving (and the students' first set of reports have shown some outstanding progress and attitude to learning) and later this month we will be holding a special "taster"event for our current Year 11s for them to find out what they can study in the Sixth Form and what SF life is like. And of course, as Christmas draws nearer, we have lots of excitement planned including our nativity show and carol concert.

In response to parental feedback, with the weather getting colder, students are permitted to wear a plain, long sleeved base layer under their uniform; it can be blue or white under the PE uniform, and white under the school uniform. We are also going to be getting student feedback on the uniform in general, with a view to bringing in changes if required (although any changes would of course be with consultation and always with a phased in period, so parents would never have to buy a new uniform until their children had grown out of the existing one). We will keep you posted on that and will, as ever, welcome your own thoughts and feedback.. Wishing you all a lovely weekend.

Wishing you all a lovely weekend,

Alison Colwell

Principal, BIC Sa Porrassa