Welcome to this week's newsletter
Welcome to Term 2!
Although only 4 days long, this week has been full again with our House Assemblies taking place for Key Stage 3 and our first return to face-to-face parents' events for our Year 11 Consultation Evening last night. These events are significant for us as a school community and demonstrate the importance of celebrating student success as well as the relationship between home and school. We look forward to the Key Stage 4 and 5 House Assemblies and our Sixth Form Consultation Evening taking place next week.
In the last academic year we ran a number of 'Meet the Co-Principals' sessions that were well attended by families as an opportunity to understand more about our principles, systems and processes, or to ask questions about specific areas of our school. If you would like the opportunity to meet with myself or another member of the Senior Leadership Team, we would be happy to arrange time for this. If you would like to book into a 'Meet the SLT' session, please email enquiries@manor.school with some possible dates and times, along with an indication of a potential area you would like to discuss. This will help us to identify the most appropriate member of the team and a time for you to meet.
Have a lovely weekend.
Lee Towers, Head of School
Getting it right - Term 1
As we review the previous term, it is an excellent opportunity to celebrate the success of many of our exceptional students.
- Nearly 11,000 REACH points were awarded during Term 1 to students across the school.
- 17% of our students were on time to school every day during Term 1, on time to every lesson, and were given no behaviour points or detentions!
- We understand that a day of illness or traffic might affect attendance or punctuality, or that sometimes students may make a minor mistake so collect a behaviour point or two over a term. Taking these into account, just over 41% of our students were in school more than the national average, collected one or two behaviour points, or were late on one occasion.
We know that students who are in school, follow the Student Code of Conduct by being Ready, Respectful and Responsible, and demonstrate our REACH values will be in a great position to be successful in their education so students in the categories above have made a great start to the academic year.
Over the first two weeks of each term we celebrate the successes of students in these categories through House Assemblies, through our attendance postcards and messages via form tutors.
Year 11 update
Thank you to all the families that joined us at last night's Consultation Evening for Year 11. Students, parents, carers and teachers we spoke to had purposeful conversations that demonstrated the importance of high quality relationships between home and school to support students in making excellent progress. If you missed the opportunity, I would encourage you to contact subject teachers or form tutors to get an overview of progress and next steps in the build up to the trial examinations.
Please see the linked document below which is an electronic copy of the handout that families were given last night including an action planning tool (The Horsforth quadrant), information about Period 6 Study Sessions, Tassomai, trial examinations, summer examinations and exciting initial news about the Class of 2023 Prom!
From Monday 7 November we are moving to a model of 'Period 6 Study Sessions' in which we would encourage all Year 11 students to head to the LRC after school to complete independent study for any of their subjects. Each day will be supervised by teachers who will support and guide students. Where subject specialists are present, they will support with subject specific content but even if there is not a subject specialist available on an afternoon it is a useful time to complete revision in a structured setting. The timetable for this - and other practical subjects that continue - is included in the booklet.
As always, if we can support our Year 11 cohort in any way, please get in touch.
Mr Bateman and Mr Cousins
Year 13 trial examinations
The timetable for the Year 13 trial examinations taking place from 21 November can be downloaded below. Students will be informed of exam locations in due course.
Year 11 prom
We are delighted to announce that we will once again be putting on an end of year prom for our Year 11 students. The event will take place on Thursday 6 July 2023 at Barton Hall, Kettering. Tickets will cost £35 with payment to be made via WisePay.
Further details about the event as well as behaviour expectations will be shared in a letter to parents/carers in the near future.
Police and fire newsletter
The November 2022 edition of Northamptonshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner's newsletter is now available to view online. In this issue the Commissioner provides an update on keeping people safe in Northamptonshire’s night-time economy. The newsletter can be viewed or downloaded from their website.
Tassomai
We are really excited to announce the relaunch of Tassomai for use by all Year 7-11 students. Tassomai is an online learning and revision platform that uses quizzing to test and teach.
Researchers into revision and learning techniques found the best way to study and get knowledge to stick is to work for concentrated short bursts, regularly test yourself and to frequently switch between topics. The Tassomai app does by using an algorithm to decide out which quizzes should be taken as part of the Daily Goal for each subject and a ‘Combined Daily Goal’, which shows the total number of questions a student needs to answer correctly across all subjects. The Daily Goal could be anywhere between 15 and 40 questions per subject and all correct answers gain points. If a student is struggling with a specific topic, the algorithm will bring up more questions from that topic until their points improve! There is also a YouTube channel that features summary videos of science topics to support further.
The Manor School teaching team can use data collected by the app to get a better idea of how to target revision on the lead up to the examinations and improve the chances of our students getting the grade they deserve.
Signing up to the app is really easy and we ask that all students do this over the next two weeks.
- Visit app.tassomai.com/signup
- Enter the school’s unique code: 97M8KMP8
- Enter their details. Use school email account to sign up.
- Choose correct classes from the drop-down menu. They can find their class codes on their timetable.
And that’s it! Once set up, students can download the app from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store if they prefer to use a phone or tablet.
If you need more information about Tassomai, or if students have any problems getting set up, please contact your child's science or maths teacher.
Extra-curricular timetable
A new term means new clubs and activities for students to participate in. Although extra-curricular activities are optional, we strongly encourage all students to enrich their school day with an additional interest. Students will earn an enrichment point for every session they attend, which will then go towards the house points totals.
The timetable for next week can be found below. We will be sharing the timetable in each edition of this newsletter as new clubs may be added or removed as we progress through the term. Should any session need to be cancelled at short notice, tutors will update students accordingly during tutor time.
Don't forget that you can access your child's student details, attendance, REACH points and homework tasks via the Arbor parent portal app.