A very warm welcome back to all of our students and parents.
Over the summer the senior leadership team have been busy writing the Academy Improvement Plan (AIP) for the year ahead. This plan builds on the many strengths recognised in the Ofsted report of June 2019 and will support us as we strive to make Queen Elizabeth’s Academy the school of choice in Mansfield.
In this first blog of the year I want to share with you the main areas of focus of our AIP. It is only by working together – staff, pupils, parents and community members – that we will achieve our aims.
At Queen Elizabeth’s Academy we deliver a curriculum that is academically rigorous and knowledge rich. We have already dedicated over two and a half academic years to crafting our curriculum, and this year we plan to refine this further. We begin every lesson with knowledge recall – we explicitly teach our pupils to retrieve knowledge from their memory. This year we will be refining the strategies we use to support the retention of knowledge. Parents can support us by ensuring pupils haves their knowledge folders with them at the academy each day and they are using their knowledge organisers at home to revise.
We have titled this year the “year of standards”. At Queen Elizabeth’s we maintain high expectations constantly, ensuring that students know with certainty what is expected of them. In every lesson all pupils must to adhere to the LEARN expectations: Lean in and listen; Equipment at the ready; Annotate and take notes; Respond like a scholar; Never interrupt.
We insist on ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in all of our interactions; if we see something which doesn’t fit with our ethos then we will challenge it. Parents can support us by ensuring all students wear the correct uniform every day, that they arrive on time with the correct equipment and are ready to learn.
As a Church of England academy, we work in partnership with the diocese to provide an education that is distinctively Christian. This year we will be further developing our collective worship and preparing for our impending SIAMs inspection (the Church of England’s version of an Ofsted inspection). We are developing our policies and practices to ensure every aspect of the Academy reflects our Christan distinctiveness: inspired by Luke 10:29-37 we give our all to all, in appreciation to God who gave his all in Jesus, offering learning without boundaries and care without limits, so that all our students can experience life in all its fullness.
I am really looking forward to working with you all again this year and getting to know our new families. As always, our door is always open – please contact your child’s tutor or Head of House if you have any concerns or queries.
Finally, we are looking forward to meeting parents of Years 5 and 6 pupils at our Open Evening on Wednesday 18 September 2019 – you can book your places here.
Miss Willmot
Academy Principal
