Week beginning 11th September 2023

A short blog at the end of Week 2 as we get everything up and running for the new academic year.

First of all, apologies for not having our Ravenswood App working. This has caused us huge issues in communicating with you and collecting money for dinners and trips. The issue was something technical at the local authority and they promise me that they are working hard to fix it. I sometimes wish I could work that hard!! The good news is that it has now been fixed and so we should have everything working smoothly by next week.

Drama Club, The Ravenswood Newspaper Team, Boys’ Football and Girls’ Football all got going this week and many other clubs are now ready to start. Encourage your child to get involved in as much as possible. As a school, we are proud of the range of extra-curricular clubs on offer and most of them are run by our staff at no cost to the children.

Well done to everyone for a great start to the term with attendance. You know how important attendance is and we will continue to celebrate it with our weekly Attendance Cups that go to the best class in each key stage. Here is a photo that we took on the final day of last year with all of our 100% children. They hadn’t had any time off for the whole year. Amazing!

One thing that really upsets me is lost property. Sometimes children behave as though they are real children, and leave their jumpers on the field after playtime or take a jumper off in the hall and forget to take it back to class. Unbelievable, I know! With 627 children in school, all wearing the same uniform, it is not easy to return the abandoned jumper to the correct child… unless they have their name clearly written inside. Usually, named lost property quickly finds its way back to the child. The only time this fails is when another child takes the jumper home, washes and wears it without checking that it is theirs. Mrs Mason has grand plans for a new lost property collection system, which we will be telling you all about very soon, but please make sure that uniform is labelled and keep checking that the label can be seen after every wash. Many thanks.

Please can you ask your children not to play with the equipment outside the Year 1 and Reception classrooms, particularly the bikes and scooters. As you know, we have changed the pick up times at the end of the day and this means that children will sometimes be waiting outside the classrooms for their younger brothers and sisters. The equipment is tidied before the gates get opened, but staff are now having to do this again after everyone has played with it, which is time consuming. We will be putting polite notices out as a reminder.

Finally for this week, I received an email from the city council saying that they wanted to get some feedback about the School Streets system. This has been a huge disappointment to me, as there have been no patrols out and no enforcement of the zone. Families are still driving and parking on Ravenswood Road and in the back lanes, which makes these areas dangerous for our pupils, but without any deterrent, there is no reason for them to stop. If you have strong views either for or against the School Streets system, please let me know and I can involve you in the feedback.