Getting to Know Straight Away

Paul Brasington

A group of us attended Paul’s funeral last Monday. It was an extremely moving event and I’ll never forget the eulogy given by Paul’s best climbing friend. It encapsulated Paul’s great love of life and made us all keenly aware of the great loss caused by his early passing.

Getting to Know Straight Away

All teenagers have a double life.

It’s typical teenage behaviour to try to jeep your life in boxes filed family, friends and school. To have maximum lifestyle control, the trick is to make sure that those three know as little as possible about each other.

So when you come home from school and someone asks what you did today, the answer has got to be along the lines of: “Nothing”...or...”Usual stuff”...or...”It was boring”. And then you launch a decoy operation by descending on the contents of the fridge like a plague of locusts.

And it’s that kind of behaviour (and it’s completely normal, by the way) which explains why the annual reports to parents and carers often provoke surprise – pleasant and unpleasant. So you hear comments like: “I didn’t know she was so good at Maths.” “How long have you been a peer mentor?” or, depressingly, to me or the staff, “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

Anyway, we’re going to shake things up a bit and try to put an end to conversations like that.

You might already know that parents can access daily information about their kids on line via our virtual leaning environment. It’s called the parental portal. This means that you can find out all sorts of data about your little darling without having to ask them to give you their highly selective version of events. The parents who use it now absolutely love it, but we need to relaunch it so that even more can benefit.

Not only that, but we’re also going to shorten the annual report process (it takes a staggering 8 weeks to complete at present) and make it available via the internet. Parents will still receive the at a glance information we’ve always given about individual subjects as well as a comprehensive prose appraisal from the form tutor. We think we can have that to parents in a fortnight. So watch this space. Jeff Allan is leading the initiative and is planning to trial it first with year 10 next term.

Comic Relief Red Nose Day

Another happy day to add to the annals of Moorside thanks to the Student Council and many members of staff who all joined in with the utterly daft spirit of the event. By the end of the afternoon the cash total raised stood at £888 and this will no doubt increase in the final reckoning. It was a mad hair day too, so here are some photos: