Week beginning 4th September 2023

Welcome back. I hope you all had a lovely summer holiday despite the weather. Typically, this week has been sunny and hot, but obviously, being British, I am not going to complain about the weather!

This year will be an exciting year for everyone at Ravenswood as we advertise for and appoint a new headteacher. I’m so old now that it is time to put away my red pen and head for the beach in July. You may be surprised that we are letting you know with a whole year to go, but the process of appointing a headteacher is quite a long one and I didn’t want anybody finding out by seeing an advert for the job in the paper. The Governing Body have already been working hard on the organisation for the application process and the job will be advertised in October. Interviews will take place in November and we will hopefully be able to announce the successful candidate in December. This is important, because if this person is already a headtecher in another school, they need to give their school two terms notice. I will then have plenty of time to hand over the reins before I leave at the end of the academic year. The appointment process is done by our excellent Governing Body and I know that they will find a fantastic person to take over from me.

This term started as usual with a staff training day, which was very successful. We have 88 staff now, so it was a busy morning, sharing the new safeguarding information from the government and discussing our plans for this year.

We have had a lovely four days with the children and they all seem to have settled well into their new classes. The new topics are all underway and you should have received a topic grid on Friday, sharing what your child will be learning. We have had a rather large technical issue with our communication systems this week and so if you haven’t received this, it will be coming very soon. Computers are wonderful when they work, but sometimes I long for the old days of a photocopied letter, not to mention the Banda machine. (If you want to see how we used to produce our copied worksheets when I first came to Ravenswood, have a look at the spirit duplicating machine in the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccYLLzpeVnU  Ours was one where you had to turn the handle yourself. It’s definitely time to retire!)