Headteacher blog 18th October 2024

We are showing lots of prospective parents around now, recruiting for September 2025. As the birth rate has dropped, marketing the school is an increasingly important part of my job. I do invest a lot of time into this, doing lots of tours during ‘normal’ school days rather than artificial ‘open days’. We have been full in Reception every year apart from one in the twenty years that I have been head, but it is increasingly difficult to achieve. Being less than full raises further financial challenges for any school.

A group of us visited a school in Pudsey on Tuesday morning to watch a phonics lesson in Reception and discuss their phonics programme overall. We are being strongly encouraged (and bribed) to adopt a DfE validated phonics scheme as 90% of other schools do. Our phonics results are strong already, and OFSTED said that our “brave” decision not to have a validated scheme was vindicated by evidence and practice last year, nevertheless we can see that there could be some advantages to moving to a scheme that retains the core of our current practice but provides more content and support. Questions remain as regards how and when we might implement these changes.

The school football season is now underway. Sadly, we remain the only primary school in Calverley, Farsley and Pudsey that enters school football teams into regular league games so most of our matches are against teams from across the Aire valley. We also have our first Saturday morning cross country event tomorrow at Woodhouse Grove: a couple of dozen runners representing school following an interesting course through the school grounds. Things are getting high tech this year, with participants wearing timing chips. I don’t think we will miss the finishing line funnelling chaos and numbered lollipop sticks!