Welcome back

6 January 2025

Dear Parent/Carer,

Happy New Year, I hope that you have had an enjoyable Christmas break. As we return for the Spring Term 2025, I’d like to mention some focus areas for us as an academy so that you can support us to make sure that your child achieves success in the widest sense and gets the most out of school life.

As you know, we had our first Section 5 Ofsted Inspection in December of last year. This was a very positive experience for us as a school and I look forward to the report being published early this year.

Good and Outstanding schools never rest on their laurels, they are always looking for areas to improve and are striving for better for the students who attend. This academic year we remain focused on attendance. Poor attendance is the number one reason that students at Outwood do not achieve well and following the pandemic we are struggling to keep our whole school attendance above 90%. This means that on average our children are having one day off per fortnight; something that is not going to lead to academic success or set them up for life in the workplace. We need your support to encourage our students into school where at all possible. We have non-teaching year heads and a member of staff who has been trained in managing medicines.

We are also focusing on our Trust-wide value ‘We turn our best into normal’ to encourage all our students to work as hard as they can across all of their subjects, not just the ones that they believe to be ‘important’. Research shows that employers value: hard work, resilience, self-discipline and reliability. We understand that not everyone is naturally academic however, too often we see students not trying and this apathy will be challenged by all staff so that all our students are encouraged to be the best that they can be. We will also work with them so that they can find strategies to aid self-motivation. This will be so much more successful if we can rely on your support in encouraging your child to try their hardest in all subjects. You can see this on Praising Stars reports as students who try hard gain E2 or E1 on those reports. 

Finally, you may not be aware of the huge suite of enrichment activities that we offer to our students. Year 11 students should already be attending after school revision and working hard at home getting into good independent study habits but we have sports, music, art, cooking, games clubs and many more available to students. Please encourage your children to attend and fully involve themselves. 

As ever, I would like to thank you for your ongoing support of our school. We are very proud of our direction of travel but I know that together we can achieve even more for our children.

Yours faithfully, 

J Norman