Last term, XP School’s C24 GCSE Spanish students grappled to answer our Guiding Question: “¿Tecnología – somos sus servidores o sus maestros? (“Technology – are we its servants or its masters?”). Whilst some might have found it difficult to articulate a response in English, imagine doing so during lockdown and in a modern foreign language!
This formed part of an expedition culminating in a Final Product centred around the family, expressing their own and their family’s reading habits and preferences, and uses of social media at home. Students collaborated to create a challenging rubric designed to encourage extended responses – including making an argument in favour of digital books or paperbacks – that was then used as the framework for our Final Product…..a monologue spoken in Spanish with accompanying slide presentation that evidenced standards ranging from beginning to excellence across a range of learning targets, such as: “I can compare and contrast reading books digitally with paper-based formats, making an argument in favour of one of these”.
Unfortunately we have had a positive case of Covid19 in Year 11 at XP
The test result came from our mass testing provision a short while ago.
Public Health England have instructed me to send students home and isolate for 10 days. Could parents collect students as soon as possible. In the meantime, students will remain in their current classroom. Everything is calm, and students have been informed.
This is just a very quick message to make Y11 parents aware of the situation.
We will move to an online provision as quickly as possible. Stay tuned for further updates.
Now that we have returned to school, I’m pleased to say that we will be opening our doors again each Saturday at the XP East site for D6, our sixth day of school provision. D6 is led by our Student Coaches and supported by our school’s Learning Coaches and is an opportunity for students to come into school to complete any additional study they’d like in a supportive and friendly environment. Whether students want to come into school and get some additional help with a specific topic or piece of Extended Study, or support from our Student Coaches, or just find a quiet space to work on their own priorities, our school is open and staff are ready to accept students.
Our invitation is initially to students in year 11 & XP16 but we hope to open things up to the whole school in the near future.
D6 will begin this Saturday 27th March for students in Year 11 & XP16 and then from April 10th for students in Year 10. However, there will be no session 3rd April as it is the Easter Bank Holiday weekend.
Sessions will begin at 9.00 and end at 12.30.
We look forward to seeing students back in school this Saturday!
Today saw the day that we’ve all been looking forward to for so long – the full return to school of all our students. Like their peers, Crew Young were promptly tested and then they were able to join other E24 students in a Community Meeting and normal afternoon sessions. WELCOME BACK, YOUNGSTERS!
Please find below a written response from Gwyn ap Harri (co-founder of XP and CEO of XP Trust) regarding the consultation surrounding the proposed changes to our school calendars.
Best wishes, Jamie Portman
Dear Parents
Thank you for your considerable feedback during the consultation regarding our school calendar. We received over 800 responses and we have read and considered every single one of your comments.
It was clear from the consultation that the vast majority of parents agreed with the Trust, that the strongly preferred calendar was Option 3, the calendar that aligns more with the newly rationalised DMBC calendar.
Over 80% of parents across the Trust either preferred this calendar or didn’t mind either way.
The strong message within the comments was for the Trust to make the right decision for our children and to focus on the quality of educational provision. As a Trust we also reflected on the fact that a majority of parents were choosing time for families to be together over potentially cheaper holidays, and that these parents were not from affluent areas.
We know from the consultation that this decision will not please all our families, who strongly preferred our old calendar, and we understand why, but moving forward on balance, we feel that the Trust will be able to work more effectively together with one unified calendar, and therefore provide a higher quality education for our children than even the high standards we are reaching now.
I apologise to the families that feel they are being inconvenienced by this decision, and we will of course honour any pre-booked holidays by families and staff.
To address some points raised by parents during the consultation:
We are proud of our differences from other Trusts, but we aren’t different just to be different, our differences are based on clear rationale. This isn’t the slippery slope to conformity. Over my dead body. In fact, watch this space…
I will never apologise for the strength of wanting to work with our Primary colleagues, in fact, my message is that all Secondary schools should do more of this, as they will benefit massively as XP has. The convention of Secondary schools dictating to Primary schools is something I abhor.
We will always take decisions on balance, but with the most important factor being the quality of provision to our children, including my own.
Finally, I would like to thank parents for their kind, beautiful and humbling comments about our schools. We were genuinely moved to tears by some, on both sides of the consultation. We work tirelessly on this very hard and very important work, and your comments reminded us why we give our todays for our childrens’ tomorrows.
There is a great opportunity for you to become our Leader of the EYFS Phase and Whole School Phonics Lead at our extraordinary school, Norton Infant School. We need someone to further design and creatively develop the Early Years Foundation Stage, working with an expert Team of EYFS leads from across the Trust.
When we return to school on Monday 22nd March, students in Year 9 will start working on the final product for their learning expedition ‘You give me fever‘, which has the guiding question:
“Why should we care about health inequality?”
The final product will celebrate and honour the work of NHS staff across the whole organisation during this most difficult of years.
We would like for small groups of students to speak with NHS workers to find out about their role, and how it has been impacted over this last year.
If you or anyone in your family is an NHS worker, we would really appreciate it if our students could speak to you about your important work.
Ideally we would like for workers to meet with small groups of our students online during Monday 29th – Wednesday 31st March.
We are looking for workers from across all of the NHS, and are especially in need of some of the typically unsung heroines and heros such as cleaners, porters or community ambulance drivers for example, although our students would learn a lot from speaking to anyone with a role in the organisation. We have many experts already lined up, but it would be great to get even more from our families at XP.
If you or someone you know can help our students to learn more about the herculean efforts of this past year, please contact Mr Said.
We can’t wait to welcome all of our students back very soon!
We are now in a position to outline our plans for the full return of students beginning on Monday 22nd March.
I can confirm that all of the measures that we had in place before the current lockdown will still be in place. For instance, the organisation of year groups into year bubbles, the staggered start and end to the day, the arrangement of year bubbles into zones in each school building, hand hygiene etc.
The arrangements for the 1st week back have an additional layer of complexity due to the recent Government announcement that ‘Pupils should return to face-to-face education following their first negative test result’. In addition to this, on their first day back students need to be tested before a year group’s normal lessons can resume. As you can imagine, the challenges around organising this for nearly 700 people are considerable but we are confident that the following plan is the best way for mitigating as much risk as possible.
Firstly, whilst we do have a mass testing provision in school that has tested key worker children and staff throughout lockdown, we simply do not have the capacity to be able to manage the testing of 700 people all at one time. Therefore, we have had to stagger the return to school due to the fact that students must be tested before normal lessons can resume. Two subsequent Covid tests (for those who have consented) will be given in school over the next fortnight, and home testing kits will be provided for students after this initial period (more updates will follow).
As you can see from the table below XP16, Y11, Y10 and Y9 students in both schools will come back on Monday 22nd March at different times in order to facilitate their first test (unfortunately we have no alternative but to make Monday 22nd March an additional holiday day for Y7 and Y8). The reason for this staggered start for year groups is to allow us to test 100 students in designated blocks of time. In addition to this, students will remain in Crew bubbles at all times until confirmation of results have been received on that first day (results from Lateral Flow Tests take approximately 30 minutes) We have organised students into Crew bubbles because we wanted to do everything that we possibly can to prevent a full year bubble being sent home should a student test positive on the first day back. After confirmation of negative test results, Crew bubbles will once again become year bubbles ultimately allowing normal lessons to resume.
* Please note – we need Y9 students to have their lunch at home before coming into school for a 12:30pm start because we do not have the capacity to test students before lunchtime (students cannot go into the wider premises until negative results have been confirmed). Please contact Crew Leaders should this be an issue.
Students and staff should continue to wear face coverings (unless exempt) but a significant change to the Government guidance is that it is strongly recommended that face coverings should now also be worn in classrooms.
When students come into school for their first day back they will be greeted by staff who will direct them straight to their Crew room. Once here, students will engage in the testing registration procedure (once consent has been given) and they will be collected by a member of staff who will escort the Crew bubble to the mass testing area in XP’s Drama Studio.
After 9 very long weeks of Lockdown, we cannot wait to get our students back. I couldn’t be more proud of our staff who have worked so hard to support our kids. As a parent myself, I just want everything to get back to normal as quickly as possible, but we’re still not fully out of this yet. We must observe the guidance that we are receiving from Government and Public Health England the best we can. Coming back to school after what will be 13 weeks off is a very important milestone for us, and we will continue to do whatever it takes to allow us all to get through this as safely as possible.
Should you have any questions or concerns about these arrangements, please contact your child’s Crew Leader in the first instance.
Best wishes,
Jamie Portman.
By Julie Wadsley4th March 2021
Calling XP and XP East students (aged 14+) who might be secret scribblers, closet novels or part time poets…
This is a five-week programme of relaxed, fun and free creative writing workshops run by local writers on Zoom. And it ends in publication!
You don’t have to think you’re a great writer to attend. Everyone is welcome from those with a hobby interest in writing or words, to those who dream of being a writer.
Here’s a little audio note you can listen to for more information
Starts: This Saturday 6th March 11.30am on Zoom (camera off is fine after check in!)
You can find out more and sign up here: http://www.hivesouthyorkshire.com/wordhatch
Jamie Portman – Principal of XP School and XP East.
