Community Connect - December 2023

Dear Parents and Carers

Welcome to our latest edition of Community Connect, which draws together just some of the diverse and exciting aspects of school life at Greenford. If you would like to look at past editions of Community Connect, you can find these on our website under the ‘Parents’ tab here. You can also find our fortnightly Parent Connect newsletter in this location too.

We have had a very successful and happy first term, and students and staff have all been working very hard. I am immensely proud of all of the additional activities that students have been involved in, be that a visit from a local MP, mock interviews for all of Year 10, plentiful trips and visits, music and drama activities or sporting achievements. You can find full details of lots of the things that have been going on as you scroll through this edition.

A reminder that it will be Week A again when we return on 8th January 2024. You can see which weeks we return on at our website link here.

I wish you all a truly wonderful break over the coming season and look forward to seeing all of our students back in full uniform, ready for learning on Monday 8th January 2024.

Mia Pye
Headteacher

Our Focus on Developing Confident Speakers

As a school, we are committed to developing our students in many ways, and confident speaking and listening is one part of this. This term we have run a project with Year 12 students called ‘Talk the Talk’ which saw Year 12 students engaged in a workshop to build confidence in speaking. We have also run a workshop for Year 10 students with the Jack Petchey Foundation who do amazing work in developing confidence in public speaking. We are also developing oracy in lessons more generally through our involvement in a project called ‘Voice 21’, where we will continue to develop students’ speaking and listening skills in their lessons.

Visiting Professionals Inspire Students

We are very fortunate to have built up a number of connections that allow our students to be inspired and learn from visiting adults from all sorts of backgrounds. This term we hosted ex-student Naomi Dattani, now a professional cricketer, who came in and gave a talk to our students. We have also welcomed Michael Tuft, a highly successful BBC Producer, along with Jeannie Waudby and Maria Adebisi, both professional authors, who came along to talk about their writing and their successes.

Parental Engagement

This academic year, we continue to improve our methods of parental and community engagement. You will have noticed our parent connect biweekly newsletters, year group specific newsletters, questionnaires and then various in-face parental events. So far, our face to face parental engagement events have included:

• Expectations evenings.
• Parents’ evenings.
• Year 7 tutor evening and social media training.
• Somali parents coffee morning. 
• Ealing safer parenting workshops to support parents with child who have additional needs. 
• A ‘helping your Y11 child to prepare for exams’ workshop.’

As always, we welcome feedback from families and would like to know if there are any additional training sessions or any information that families would like to be included in our parental engagement programme.

Media students celebrate Greenford’s Oscars

Greenford High School Media students celebrated their Media Awards this term – the school’s version of the Hollywood Oscars. The glittering awards ceremony saw staff and students gather to celebrate the incredible creativity across A Level and GCSE Media Studies.

The final awards of Best Production at GCSE and A Level were awarded to Malak for Happier Than Ever and Lemuel for his original music artist promo Poki. The People’s Choice awards were collected by Amariah and Isra for GCSE and A Level respectively.

You can read more about the event – including a full list of the winners – on the school website here. 

D of E Expedition

We are delighted that students have been given the opportunity to take part in the prestigious Duke of Edinburgh award once again, and were thrilled that they undertook such a successful expedition back in October. Students are now busy working on other aspects of the award such as volunteering. Our very own Mr Dudman-Jones has been officially accredited as a verifier for the award, and he will soon be busy checking that students have completed what they have committed to.  Well done to all those involved.

Trips

Once again, we have sent students out on a wide variety of trips this year including visits to universities, theatres, museums, places of work, geography field trips and of course the D of E trip. See some of our wonderful trips and excursions in the images below.

Music and Performing Arts Concert

We were treated to a wonderful Winter Concert this year with outstanding performances across the full age range in music and drama. It was wonderful to see our new Year 7 choir perform a Christmas song, and also to be entertained by our KS3 Drama group with their alternative version of Cinderella.  That, along with outstanding musical solos, duos, rock band numbers and other group performances made for one of our best concerts ever! Thank you very much to all the parents and carers who came along to support and well done to all the staff and students who were involved.

Library Update

The start of term was extremely busy for the library, and in our second week we hosted an author visit from Ross Montgomery. Ross wrote the book Chimeseekers, which all Year 7s were given on their Induction Day, in July. A number of Year 7s were invited to attend the event in the main library, and had a great afternoon.

Free Books for Year 7s

Our Year 7 pupils have been given a free book from the library. There were 16 books to choose from, as part of the Book Trust #BookBuzz initiative, and these have now been delivered to pupils. We hope that they enjoy reading them!

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 Halloween, with lots of scary book recommendations and a few puzzles! By signing in pupils can check what books they have on loan and reserve books. You can view the library catalogue here. If they check the catalogue regularly, pupils can also take responsibility for their own books, ensuring they know what books they have on loan and when they are due back.

E-book library

As well as having a well stocked school library, we also have a great eBook library, called Wheelers. 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 holidays.

Accelerated Reader

Accelerated Reader. Pupils in Years 7 and 8, Sets 3 and 4 literacy lessons have an Accelerated Reader class in the library. All pupils in these literacy classes should take an Accelerated Reader quiz every time they finish a book. Each week, prizes and character points are awarded to pupils who have scored highly in their quizzes. Congratulations to Faizul in Year 7 and Lee-Roy in Year 8, who have already scored over 100 points in Accelerated Reader!

Form Time Reading

We launched our Form Time Reading Project straight after October half term, and it has proved very popular so far. Each week, all students in Years 7, 8 and 9 spend Tuesday registration reading as a shared form time activity, with their form tutor. The intention is to offer a communal experience of reading the same book, while also learning new words to extend students' vocabulary skills, and to offer themes for discussion. Reading aloud and being read to also help to encourage good reading and listening skills, as well as good oracy skills (the ability to articulate ideas, develop understanding and to engage with others through spoken language.) 

Students in Year 7 are reading ‘Notting Hill Carnival: A West Side Story’ by Candice Carty-Williams; Students in Year 8 are reading ‘You Are A Champion: How To Be The Best You Can Be’ by Marcus Rashford, and students in Year 9 are reading ‘Needle’ by Patrice Lawrence. 

Selected students will be chosen to participate in a Greenford Read event, based on the book they have been reading, later in the school year.  

English Schools Chess Championship

In November, GHS hosted a regional stage of the English Schools Chess Tournament, with other local schools visiting us. From these regional qualifiers, 2 of the 3 teams that GHS entered have qualified for the main regional stage for the English Chess Federation National Chess Tournament. We had a mix of students from Years 8-12 representing the school.

Congratulations to those pupils who took part, and don't forget that our ever popular Chess Club is on Mondays after school in the library.

Year 10 Mock Interviews careers event

Year 10 students were given a mock job interview by local employers in our first big careers event of the year. The mock interviews gave students an insight into the type of questions they may well face as part of the selection process for apprenticeships or employment in future. Our visiting employers were incredibly impressed with Year 10, praising their positive attitude and interesting range of answers as they interviewed an incredible 280 students.

Our careers platform Unifrog has a huge amount of information on everything from CV writing and job interviews to subject libraries for GCSE, A Level or university options choices. Greenford parents can access Unifrog as if they were a student using the exclusive code GRHSParent. Just go to https://www.unifrog.org/code and put in the GHS code and your details to sign up and access all Unifrog has to offer.

Sports Round Up

A busy month in PE has seen hundreds of students engaged in competitive school sport, extracurricular clubs and leadership activities.

The football season gathers pace for all year groups, with Year 8 and 6th Form teams still involved in Middlesex Cup action.  Ealing Borough Netball tournaments are up and running, with Year11 giving a great account of themselves against 6th form teams from across the borough.

Indoor athletics has started up, and Mr Moors has been putting Year 7 through their paces. GHS will be hosting both the primary and Year 7/8 competitions in December, as well as a primary schools indoor cricket competition.

Turnout at lunch and after-school clubs has been phenomenal this year, with basketball regularly having 25-30 students, while netball, table tennis and football are close behind.  The winter months will see opportunities for students to use the fitness suite to promote their wellbeing.

All of this is testament to the hard work of the PE staff and the incredible dedication of our student athletes, whether they are participating in pursuit of success or purely for the joy of movement and social interaction. They are a credit to our school community.

Bukayo Saka Mural

Back in October, we were thrilled to be approached by a company acting on behalf of ex-student Bukayo Saka, Arsenal and England football star. The company wished to install a mural on the school site and we couldn’t be more pleased with the result. If you are ever in the vicinity of the sports hall, then do pop in and take a look - it is a wonderful piece of artwork and a brilliant tribute to our talented ex-student.

Year 9 TFL Safety Workshop

As part of our focus on safe travel to school, we had a visit from TFL at the beginning of November. The visit centred around personal safety when on public transport and also educated students about what to do if they experience sexual harassment on public transport in London.

Post 16 News

Year 13 students have been submitting their UCAS applications this term and they have been met with a steady stream of offers from some outstanding universities. Students that applied to Oxford and Cambridge, if successful, will be invited to interview in early December. Our aspiring medics and dentists will receive invitations to interview over the next few months. 

Year 12 students, now fully settled onto their courses, are very much contributing to the wider school community by involving themselves in the GHS Community Passport. Their voluntary work ranges from supporting academic and sports clubs after school to working lower school students in lessons during the day. A select group of year 12 students have also been serving as mentors to a group of year 8 students, supporting them with being the very best versions of themselves and overcoming the challenges of juggling the different demands of school life.

Both year 13 and year 13 students will need to be fully committed to their studies, over the Christmas break, in preparation for the all important mock exams that begin for both year groups on the second week back in January.    
 

Senior Maths Challenge

In October, a number of our Post 16 students took part in the Nationwide Senior Mathematical Challenge, organised by the UK Maths Trust. 

Huge congratulations to those students who took part and managed to secure a bronze, silver or gold certificate. Particular mention goes to Salah, Bavneet, Amr and Elias, who went onto to the next level of the challenge, Kangaroo Maths Challenge, where Elias secured a Merit.

Visit from James Murray, MP

6th form politics students have been fortunate to have a meeting with James Murrray, MP, to find out first-hand what it is like to work in Westminster! Mr Murray visited us in mid-November to answer questions and give his insights to our students. He also met with a group of Year 11 students to discuss the Life Skills workshop that was run last year and to ask students about the impact the workshop has had on their progress. Mr Murray said our students were full of intelligent and interesting questions and confidence - no surprise there!