Newsletter

Hello and welcome to the summer edition of the Wentworth High School Newsletter.  I hope that you will once more find what we have produced to be entertaining and informative. 

In this issue there is an article about our successful campaign to provide resources for a school in Ghana, a piece describing how four of our older pupils were given the Diana Award, photos of the Right Honourable Ian Stewart MP presenting our year 11 pupils with their Records of Achievement, and the usual updates from each faculty and year group.

We are now, as they say in the sporting world, at the ‘business end’ of the year, with year 9 pupils having recently taken their SATs examinations and year 11 well underway with their GCSEs.

Credit must go to year 9 for the way they conducted themselves throughout a very hot few days during the SATs, and I wish to express my sincere thanks to Miss Garbutt for standing in so efficiently as their Achievement Coordinator.

Year 11 pupils have also impressed me recently, and they clearly left the company we booked to deliver a study skills day just before the exams in no doubt about what they thought.  In a letter to the school a couple of days later the organiser wrote;

“Your students were an absolute pleasure to teach and a credit to your school.”

“They were some of the best year 11 students I have had the pleasure to work with.”

True praise indeed from a company that delivers dozens of seminars a year all around the country.

Not to be outdone, year 10 have also impressed recently, stepping up to take on the school prefect roles, as year 11 concentrate on their GCSEs.  We have a good group of reliable, hard-working pupils in year 10 and I am sure that they will do themselves, and the school, proud as they carry out their duties.

Our younger pupils are also doing very well.  I frequently tell years 7 and 8 in assembly that we are very pleased with the progress they are making and this is no over-statement.  They are also a group of responsible, young people who are a credit to the school and their families.

So, overall, I am very pleased with the way things are going at present. I know that part of my job is never to be fully satisfied with what we are doing, and always to look for how we can improve things, but I am also very conscious of what we are doing well.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, I went around the school during the last lesson on a Friday afternoon.  It was very hot, I had seven teachers out of school for various reasons, and year 9 were at the end of a very demanding week of SATs.  Many schools would creak under these circumstances, but Wentworth High School was quiet, orderly and purposeful, and all the lessons I went into were productive and focused.  At the end of the day I wrote a note to all the staff, thanking them for their efforts, and concluded by saying:

“We sometimes forget how good we really are, and might yet have to prove it to certain people, but I already know”.

I hope you do too.  Thanks for your continued support.  Enjoy the newsletter.

J C Keeble