Reaching high for the best for your child

I can now confirm that today is the last day that Fairlands Primary School will be a local authority maintained school and, from 1st April 2017, we will convert formally to academy status within our new multi-academy trust, The Claxton Trust.

This is an important day as it marks the beginning of our new journey within the trust. As we have said all along, in some senses everything is changing, but in another, everything will be staying the same. Same Fairlands logo, same uniform, same teachers and most importantly, the same children!

So, what will be different?

Well, yesterday the two leadership teams from Fairlands and Camps Hill met together to agree what our aims will be for the first year of the trust. We agreed the following:

   - Inspiring and empowering through collaboration and innovation

   - Building a safe, nurturing and supportive community that empowers all young people, families and staff to succeed

   - Ensuring that all pupils experience high quality teaching and learning in an inclusive environment

   - Embracing a reflective culture of continual improvement which grows and develops an outstanding trust community

   - Working efficiently across the trust to ensure value for money and organisational resilience

We will be sharing with you soon what our ideas are for actions against each of these aims, and how they will impact on everyone in our trust, including children, familes and staff.

If you have any ideas then please feel free to email me! head@fairlandsherts.sch.uk

We are holding Parent Consultation Evenings for children in Reception to Year 6 on Monday 27th March from 5.30pm – 8.00pm and Tuesday 28th March  from 3.30pm to 6.00pm and Nursery Children during the school day on Monday 27^th and Tuesday 28^th March.

Appointments can be booked using the online appointment booking system. This allows you to choose your own appointment times with teachers and, once you make an appointment, you will receive an email confirming this.  You will only receive a confirmation email if we have your correct email address on our database.  It is, therefore, really important to ensure you have returned your Data Collection Sheet giving your correct email details AND registered on the SchoolGateway at www.schoolgateway.com by the end of this week.              

The online booking system will be open from 12.00pm on Sunday 12th March.  Please visit https://fairlands.parentseveningsystem.co.uk to book your appointment(s).

This month our value is Democracy. The School Council have asked children and their parents and carers to come up with ideas of how we could celebrate joining the Claxton Trust with Camps Hill School. They collected all of the ideas and have chosen their favourite two.

The two options are:

• To organise an aerial photograph of the children at each school.

• To organise pen pals across both school. 

All children, across both schools, will have the opportunity to vote on their preferred choice this half term. 

At the last Parent Forum, parents asked that children’s social development be a focus of the School Council for the spring term.  This links well for our Value for February which is Love.  As always, we welcome the views of parents/carers on how we could approach this.   Please email your thoughts to school-development@fairlands.herts.sch.uk or come along to our next Parent Forum at 2.00pm on Friday, 4th February.

This morning the children enjoyed their Christmas Celebration Assembly, traditionally finishing with Year 6's Circle of Light.  We also said farewell and thank you to Mrs Denis, Miss Stapleford and Mrs Fernie and contratulated Mrs Ansel and Mrs Bull, who were presented with their HCC Long Service Award.  We wish to you all a very Merry Christmas and look forward to seeing you back at school on Monday, 9th January 2017.

Recently, we asked you to fill out a brief evaluation of our Shared Reading sessions in EYFS and KS1 and a fantastic 58 of you responded! Thank you so much for taking the time to share your comments, it is through this feedback that we can review our practice and make sure you and your children are supported in the best possible way.

 Out of 58 responses, 57 said that their child enjoys shared reading.

 17 responses were happy with things as they are and chose not to leave extra comments.

 28 of you were extremely positive, adding that there is no need to change Shared Reading in any way at all.

 14 of you added ideas or suggestions for improvement, whilst also saying that they were happy with having Shared Reading available as a time to support their child's learning and wellbeing. 

 Comments and suggestions included:

“Nothing, reading at home is a struggle so being able to share a book with my child makes my week.”

 “Nothing to improve, great idea as we don’t often dedicate as much time as we could to read as other children have homework etc. Found my son loves shared reading.”

 “Access to higher level phonics books to practise (so we know what to aim for).”

 “I think it’s a great idea, I love being able to come into her class read to her, get games and she shows me around her class."

 “Shared reading is a fantastic opportunity to spend time with our child in their learning environment. I really enjoy this and feel it could be a bonus to flick through recent work.”

All of your ideas and comments have passed on to the Headship Team who will be analysing them after half term. Once again, thank you for your time and we are so pleased that so many of you value Shared Reading!

The first Parent Forum meeting of the year is this Friday 30th September at 9am. This year, Mr Staples will be leading the meetings and other staff will come along to discuss topics as they arise. 

You will also have the opportunity to raise any general issues, so this is a really good opportunity for you to work with the school leadership to make our school even better! Please come to the upper site recpetion - we look forward to seeing you!

For your diary - the second meeting will be on Friday 21st October at 9am.