7th May 2020

Dear Parents and Carers,

I hope you are all well. Things seem strangely quiet this week. I suspect that will all change with the announcements on Sunday about, amongst other things, a timetable to re-open schools. If there is anything that I think we need to share with you following those announcements, I’ll write to you on Monday. At the minute, I could guess what the plan will be but it would be no more than that.

For those of you with children in Year 11, we wrote to you about the subject focus weeks we are running to give students a taste of Year 12. This week has been geography. Next week is Psychology. Resources are posted on Go4Schools on Monday mornings. If you would like more details, contact Miss Hopkins at dhopkins@samuelward.co.uk. We are also taking expressions of interest for a graphics a-level next year. If there are enough students who want to do it, we’ll put it on. Finally on the sixth form, we are still accepting applications for September. If your child doesn’t have a place at a college yet, or is concerned about needing to retake some GCSEs in a new environment in the autumn, contact Miss Hopkins to discuss coming to HC6.

It’s bank holiday tomorrow of course, moved to a Friday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of VE day. The history department have sent out some very informative and thought-provoking materials about the end of WWII. The figure of 18,000,000 service personnel being killed throughout the war didn’t surprise me at all, but the fact that more than twice than number of civilians were killed shocked me. If your children haven’t looked at those materials yet, I encourage you to have a look together. They are really very interesting.

The highlights of my week have been watching the English department reading the first act of An Inspector Calls on Twitter despite the challenges of social distancing and sometimes shaky wi-fi, and seeing the amazingly mature self-portrait from Noah in Year 7, also now on Twitter. I found Noah’s picture really quite emotional. If anything on twitter deserves to be shared widely, it’s that.

Have a good weekend,

Andy Hunter

Headteacher