Dear colleagues,

Hello and welcome once again to Heads Up.

I have been looking to bring these introductions into line by theming them each week. With such a mass of information and changing guidance as well as the “business as usual” coming back into our days, it would be easy to tackle a lots of subjects.  But in the end, saying so much runs the risk of not saying anything so I am disciplining myself, as best I can, to keep to just the one issue and focusing on it.

So this week, with the end of the most traumatic summer term in memory looming, we have been giving some thought to the transition from primary to secondary schools of our current year 6.

This is a potentially stressful period for an eleven year old at the best of times and I will reiterate my gratitude again for all of you who have worked so hard to have pupils from that cohort in your schools to spend some time with you before they make that leap. It will have been hugely beneficial to the children and, of course, was the main reason that the Government identified them as a priority year group.

There does remain a few things that you can do in the coming weeks to help these children prepare.  We are in the process of producing an animation with useful tips for parents and carers as well as children of the year 6 group which we will be promoting, as with previous animations, through social media channels.

In that, we talk about how children and their families can acquaint themselves with the school via its website and social media. We hope that the children will find them useful vehicles to get a feel for the school, its timetables, activities and messages from headteachers, heads of year and other form teachers.

We point towards mentors, year 7 pastoral leaders, tutor groups or even mentors among current pupils. If you have these systems in place at your school, please try to ensure that they are clearly signposted from your website.  If you haven’t got much on the site at the moment, are there any quick fixes that you can do – maybe a welcome video from the head of Year 7 so that children will see a face and hear a voice? It can be done quickly and easily and will be a real benefit to concerned children and their families.

In the animation, we talk about being kind and that builds on the subject of structured kindness that has interested me so much in recent months. Kindness brings so many benefits and it would be a good thing to come out of this crisis if we were able to carry forward some of the drive towards thinking and caring about others that has been prevalent across all age groups in recent months.

Sadly, it will be inevitable that some of our children will feel the strain of the disruption of recent months and the return to school will be a period where we need to keep an extra eye on them.

So, along with the animation, we are also producing a poster for your staff rooms that brings all of the support services for young people’s mental health and wellbeing into one place. It will, we hope, be a useful tool to show teachers where to go for support should they be concerned about the wellbeing of a pupil or student.  Knowing where to turn to for help is key to addressing the issue swiftly and more effectively so we trust that this will be a welcome addition to the collateral that we have been producing to help you to help our children.

I am going to sign off in what is becoming my consistent theme. Please try to get some downtime over the weekend to refresh and recharge. Weather forecasts suggest that we may have had the best of the sunshine this week but, just because you are indoors, try not to give in to the temptation to look at the laptops too much.

We’ll be back with the briefing on Monday. Take care.

Ian Budd

Assistant Director for Education Services