Community Connect - July 2023

Dear Parents and Carers

Welcome to our last edition of Community Connect for this year. I hope you will enjoy seeing some images of all of the amazing things that have been happening this term at GHS.

As we reach the end of this year, I would like to thank all parents and carers for all of their support in what has been a very successful year, both academically and more widely, with students involved in a large range of activities outside of lessons.

As we make plans for next year, I would like to remind parents and carers of the need to ensure that their children come into school every single day, at 8:30am. You may be aware that since the Covid pandemic, attendance levels for students have decreased nationally in many schools. Whilst attendance remains good at GHS, we will be having a strong drive next year to ensure that attendance is excellent from every student, as we know that being in school is the most important thing to ensure excellent examination results.  In September, we will also be much stricter about uniform, so please ensure that you purchase any items that your child requires for September, and let us know if you need any support with this.

We are very proud of all of our students who work hard, achieve well, are polite and provide a positive contribution to GHS, every single day. You can read more about some of the things your children have been up to by scrolling through the information below.

I wish you and your families a wonderful summer break and thank you once again for your support this year.

Mia Pye
Headteacher

Year 11s and Year 13s Show True GHS Resilience in Exam Season

Yet again, our wonderful Year 11 and Year 13 students have demonstrated our key character strengths, as they tackled their exams with true GHS courage and resilience!  Staff have worked incredibly hard to support them and alongside our usual additional revision classes and interventions, we have provided Saturday sessions, Easter and May half-term revision sessions and English, Maths and Science form-time masterclasses. In addition, the ‘drop-down’ sessions right before the exams enabled students to access last minute revision and a boost in confidence. These, combined with the morning sessions in the canteen, where students could grab a light breakfast and enjoy some prep time with teachers and peers, led to a calm, confident atmosphere and a feeling of ‘can-do’ from our students. Well done, class of 2023!

Year 11s Celebrate in Style

As a reward for their exceptionally hard work, GHS hosted its first Year 11 Prom in 4 years and it was a roaring success.  Students were dressed beautifully for the occasion and danced the evening away in our specially transformed dance hall, complete with light-up dancefloor and red carpet! Our Year 11 students had a fantastic time, and it was a wonderful way to celebrate the end of the exam period.

The Prom was preceded by a final assembly which Year 11 came in for dressed in an array of highly creative shirts. The pastoral team and the form tutors celebrated our students with pictures, videos and memories of the last five years and it was a very touching way to mark the end of Key Stage 4. 

D of E Returns to GHS

We are very excited to have become a Duke of Edinburgh Direct Licensing Centre, which means that we will be able to run our own D of E expeditions and take students through the entire programme. We already have 31 enthusiastic Year 10s signed up, and alongside the very capable Ms Rayner, we have Ms Hayes and Mr Kitson, both highly experienced outdoor enthusiasts, ready and primed to support. The Year 10s undertook their first practice expedition to Chorleywood on Thursday 6th July, and it was a great success. It was wonderful to see all the groups eager to learn new skills in navigation and the soft skills involved in getting the whole team around a 12km route without getting lost! Highlights included seeing our young people out in an unfamiliar environment, enjoying the farm animals they met along their route and how nicely they interacted with locals. They merrily climbed, danced, walked and ate their way through the day! 

Trips, Trips and More Trips! 

By the time we reach the end of the year, GHS will have run 119 trips! This is a phenomenal achievement and something that we are very proud of as a school. Recent highlights include whole year group reward trips to Whipsnade Zoo, Kew Gardens and Thorpe Park, as well as academically driven trips to universities including Kings College London, Royal Hollway, Queen Mary, Cambridge, Oxford and Roehampton, and multiple cultural and educational trips into London including the National Portrait Gallery, The Business Design Centre, Westminster Abbey, Twist Museum and Canary Wharf and Greenwich. We are also delighted to have reintroduced our day trips to Boulogne in France for MFL students in Year 9 and 10.

Library Update

We always encourage pupils to read a diverse range of books, and love displaying books on themes and for particular occasions. 

Accessit Library and eBooks

Our Library catalogue, Accessit, is a wonderful way for pupils to get to know what books are available in the library. The Accessit home page is updated regularly - a recent theme was Star Wars Day. By signing in pupils can check what books they have on loan and reserve books. You can view the library catalogue here. By signing in to the library catalogue pupils can also take responsibility for their own books, ensuring they know what books they have on loan and when they are due back.

Summer Reading Recommendations

Research has shown that continuing to read for pleasure over the summer avoids the ‘dip’ in learning by keeping children’s minds engaged. We will be recommending books to read over the summer via the desktop announcements in school, in the final days of term before the summer. All the books recommended are available in our well stocked school Library and on the Wheelers eBook platform. The eBook library link can be found here. All pupils will have been emailed their usernames and passwords, but if in doubt, they can email ghslib@greenford.ealing.sch.uk to check. Please do encourage your son or daughter to borrow books from the Library before the end of term, and to keep reading over the summer.    

Year 7 Greenford Read

Greenford Read is Greenford’s well established whole school book club. This year we have run a form time reading project, for students in Year 7 and Year 8, ensuring that the whole year group got to read a book together with their tutor during morning registration. The Year 7 book was ‘Notting Hill Carnival: a West Side Story’ by Candice Carty Wiliams, a modern day story of a relationship between two young people, from rival gangs, set within the annual cultural  celebration of Carnival. Three students from each tutor group volunteered to come together to get involved in activities and discussion based on the themes from the book, allowing us to discuss gang culture and cultural understanding through the context of the story. 

The students involved were a real credit to their year group, demonstrating maturity and respect for each other’s views. Only a few of the students present had ever been to the Carnival before, but many more expressed an interest in attending, having read the book. Reading books for pleasure allows us to experience each other's worlds and thus promotes cultural understanding. Perhaps more members of our Greenford community will feel inspired to attend London’s biggest Carnival event in Notting Hill over the August bank holiday weekend, before the new term starts in September?    

World Book Day

Greenford High School has a long-standing tradition of celebrating World Book Day and this year was no exception. On Thursday July 6th, members of staff arrived in full costume, dressed  as characters from books: Ms Williams, Head of English, beautifully attired as Gilbert Joseph, the main character from ‘Small Island’ by Andrea Levy;   Mr. Lewis, Head of the Sixth Form, cleverly encapsulated ‘The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe by C S Lewis;  and members of the MFL department represented several characters from the ‘Mr. Men’ and ‘Little Miss’ series,  by Roger Hargreaves, as they are known in their many different translations. This names just a few of the many outfits on show, all with the purpose of promotion and encouraging reading for pleasure.  The highlight of the day was the staff performance of an excerpt from the play ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime’ by Mark Haddon. The Library was full of students at break time, to watch Messrs Chapman, Gunn, Mather, Halsey and Conlon, Ms. Grimley and Ms. Juster demonstrate  their excellent acting skills. All the students who attended were presented with a  free copy of the book, courtesy of the English Department. 

MFL Spelling Bee National Final at the University of Cambridge

One of our Year 7 pupils, Ruby represented our school brilliantly at the MFL Spelling Bee National Final at the University of Cambridge - reaching the last 100 students from the 21,000+ that began the competition back in September - no mean feat! 

Unfortunately, despite spelling 17 words correctly in the allocated minute, Ruby didn't make the grand final but Ms. Ayres, her parents and the MFL team are incredibly proud of how far she came and how hard she worked - a real testament to her character! Also thank you to Heer in Year 7, who made the trip up to Cambridge to support Ruby and has helped her revise since Easter - both the girls' commitment to Spelling Bee this year has been amazing!
 

Sports Day

Once again, we have enjoyed a highly successful Sports Day which saw Years 7 - 9 compete in a whole host of events including 100m, high jump, discus as well as many more. The day saw lots of enjoyment across KS3, and some excellent displays of performance with 18 records being broken across all 3 year groups. A big well done to forms 7M3, 8T2, and 9G2 who were the highest scoring forms in their year group after all events were combined.

Students represented Greenford fantastically which helped to conclude 2023 with a fun and enjoyable Sports Day for all.

Sports Round Up

At GHS, we are very proud of the amount of cricket that has been played this year, and we are making great strides in developing our teams. Highlights this season have included both the year 8 and 10 teams making it to the finals of the Ealing Borough championships, while a fledgling year 7 team showed real promise in finishing second in their league.

Year 7 to 10 Rounders teams competed in the Borough leagues and tournaments, highlights of the season were the year 9’s reaching the semi finals of their tournament with special mention to Dhiya and Nadine who were standout players who made a significant contribution to their teams success.  After a slow start the year 7 team played well in their tournament with Zainab, Ellie, Promise and Ruby working together to field triumphantly against Ealing Fields and Northolt.

Our athletics teams once again showed that they can match it with the best in the borough, with six year 7 and 8 students representing Ealing at the Middlesex Championships. 

We had a year 9 Ealing long jump champion in Richard Strazdas, while the year 10 team saw Taylor Carey, Tiago la Touche, Remy-Felix Paquille and Ariyan Yadollahi-Farsani collecting silver medals in the high jump (x2), javelin and 1500m respectively.

Post 16 News

The summer term is an opportunity to celebrate the journey that our students have been on in Post 16. Year 13 students have now sat their final exams and look forward to celebrating their results on Thursday 17th August. Students in Year 12 have been wonderfully focussed on achieving in their end of year exams and, as their own university journey commences, they have been embarking on Open Days up and down the country and broadening their horizons on a vast array of school trips. 

International Day

For the second year running, we have run our hugely popular international day, where staff and students have dressed in clothes connected to their heritage and where we have celebrated all things international, including languages, dancing and song. 

Creative/Design and Art Exhibition

On 4th July, we were very proud to exhibit a range of work from our very talented artistic and creative students. The exhibition showcased Art pieces, Photography, Product Design, Drama performances and Music ensembles all under one roof where our students proudly showed off their amazing achievements.

GHS welcomes Year 6!

On 30th June, we were thrilled to welcome our next cohort of Year 7 students, who will be joining us in September. All those with a place at GHS were invited to the induction day where they learnt about our expectations at GHS, navigated their way around our large site, took part in Maths and English activities and enjoyed a fun sports afternoon.

Celebrate your child’s character points with the Satchel One app

Have you signed up to the Satchel One app yet?  If not, then take a moment to do so. Not only can you see all of the homework that your child has been set, but you will also receive notifications each time that your child receives a character point in school.  
To install the app, simply visit your mobile phone app store - either the Apple App Store or Google Play and search for ‘Satchel One’. Then enter the unique parent code that is on your letter / email about ‘Show My Homework’ which we have sent out again recently, and from there follow the on-screen instructions.  

GHS Staff Share their Research-Led Learning

Our staff at GHS are committed to continually developing our teaching approaches to benefit our students.  This year, teachers have been using some of the latest research into outstanding teaching and applying these strategies with their classes.  This culminated in teachers sharing the outcomes of their classroom research with colleagues in an end of term training event.  Sessions included improving the motivation and engagement of students, developing extended writing in KS5 and how we can better use visuals to support students to access learning. All sessions were enjoyable and informative and will help us to continue to improve the learning of our students next academic year.