Saturday, 11 September 2010

This Way to Enchantment

Our new year 7 students started on Tuesday.
You can’t miss them because they’re the ones with puzzled faces and learning passports flapping open at the timetable page as they try to navigate from lesson to lesson.
You might know that some of our younger pupils take a lesson called Enrichment. Anyway, year 7 had Enrichment on Tuesday afternoon and Jim Green, helpful as always, was on the corridor directing the traffic of newcomers.
Apparently, an earnest young man said to him, “Is this the way to Enchantment?”
Well, I thought that was great.
First of all, I think we should give serious thought to making that change of name official.
And secondly, that charming error was somehow in keeping with how things have been for me in the past few weeks.
I know it can’t always be like this, but life has been magic recently. I had a legendary summer holiday in some beautiful places with much loved friends and family. I’ve sat in a luscious Mallorcan garden watching the sun go down over the mountains, picnicked on a hot Sunday afternoon on Primrose hill listening to the lads crashing in six goals against Villa and fended off the badgers trying to steal food from my tent by Ullswater.
It’s been great.
But Moorside was never far from my thoughts, especially my speculation about what news would come on August 24th about our exam results.
Well, it was like winning the lottery.
We had a hunch that they would be good, but in reality they were by far the best on record and confirmed that 2009-10 was the most successful year overall in Moorside’s long history.
You’ll find the figures elsewhere on the website and they confirm Moorside’s place among the top schools in the country. I’ll just give you a couple of statistics.
84% of year 11 leavers beat the expectations we had of them based on SATs and test results at the end of year 6. That means that we added value to the learning and achievement of the overwhelming majority which we think will put is in the top 5% of schools nationally.
It’s easy to start a new term on the back of news like that and the whole Moorside team should take the credit for creating a school culture which produces such stunning outcomes.
And Moorside isn’t just about exam results as you’ll know from the wealth of other great work we do, but exam grades are a symptom of our very high professional standards and 100% commitment to our young people.
But that’s not all of the good news.
On Monday, for the first time ever the entire staffs of Moorside and Consett Community Sports College came together for a joint training event as part of our preparations for amalgamating as the Consett Academy next year. It was a landmark event which certainly left me full of optimism about how well we’ll work together from now on.
If you want to find out more about the Consett Academy, come along to one or both of the forthcoming open evenings for prospective parents. The Moorside one is on September 22nd, 2010 and the CCSC one is on September 23rd – both at 6.30pm. You’ll get the chance to see at first hand what’s happening in the schools right now and hear about the sponsors’ proposals for the new academy and how they will build on our good practice.

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