On Wednesday, I was delighted to present four of our students with graded music awards in recognition of their hard work. Thank you to Harry, James, Wing and Imogen for all their hard work and to Mr Batley who provides such inspiration and support to the students.

Duke of Edinburgh

This weekend we have 48 of our students out on the final practice expedition in Derbyshire. Opportunities like this would not happen without the support and voluntary work of our staff and our thanks to them for everything they do and best wishes to our students as they take on the weekend challenge.

Examinations

There have been a number of major examinations this week and our students have again shown a calm and mature approach to assessment. It has also been a pleasure to see how the rest of the school have responded, with younger students quiet in areas near to where examinations are taking place. This will need to continue for the next few weeks and I thank them in advance.

Governing Body

Our governors met again on Wednesday evening to review the management of the school's resources and buildings. We hope to hear before the end of this term the date when we can expect work to start on the new build and it can not come too soon. We continue to grow as a school and whilst our premises team do a fantastic job on maintaining the site, we look forward to seeing new facilities built in the next few years.

New staff

We have appointed a number of new staff for September and we will introduce them at the start of the new academic year. We are really pleased that applicants are consistent in their praise for the welcome to the school, the friendliness of the students and the opportunity to see a school that has the autonomy to make its own decisions about how we teach and how we organise our learning community. At the same time we also recognise that there is a national shortage of teaching staff. This week alone there are 12000 vacancies being advertised in the TES and so we do not underestimate the challenge we have as a school. However, I hope it is the sense of community, support and positive approaches that draw people to want to work at Chilwell.

Partnership

I ended my week with a meeting with our partner primary head teachers. We have a strong partnership and we discussed transition and joint events. We look forward to the forthcoming sports days and music events that bring our schools together.