St Cecilia's News

Dear Parents,

I hope that this short half term is going well for you and your family. We have a half term holiday coming up from 12-16 February.

Now that we have had our School Inspection we can determine our final training day of the year, this has been allocated to Monday 3rd June, we have added it on to a holiday, we hope that makes it easier for you.

Our newsletter now offers translated text

Our OFSTED news is available as a separate newsletter, I know that many of you use the special translation features in our Class Dojo messages, this facility is now available through our monthly newsletters as well. I have included a link to the OFSTED message for you below in case you would like to see the translated version in your home language, if that is not English.

Click on the Translate button at the top of each newsletter to translate the text.

absence@stcecilias.school

The School Office receives a large number of emails each day, from parents, agencies and many companies. We have now created a new absence@ email to help us process absence notifications more easily. Please email absence@stcecilias.school to either report your child's absence or to request an absence from school in advance.

The system will send you an email by reply to confirm successful receipt, if you do not receive this we have not received your message so please check the email address.

Please note that the email address is absence@ not the plural of absences!

Extra Curricular Activities

We are currently planning clubs for the Summer term, if you know of a provider who could provide an interesting club please ask them to get in touch with us via the school office. We are finding that many providers are now too expensive and this is limiting the offer that we can make to you. We welcome any feedback.

Best wishes for the half term break!

Vince Burke

Headteacher

It's important that as a staff we continue to keep learning and keep up to date. Education is changing all the time as it meets the changing technological and social demands of society.

OFSTED recently commented on the considerable effort we put in to staff development and training. Whilst we provide regular training to staff through our meetings and local conferences with other schools, at times staff undertake more detailed long term studies to help support and benefit our work here at St Cecilia's.

The Governing Body are keen to support our staff with their professional development and are very pleased to join us in congratulating Mrs Scripps, Senior Leader for Curriculum Design and Innovation and Mrs Dean, Senior Leader for Teaching and Learning who have both recently passed their National Professional Qualification for Senior Leadership in schools.

These longer term and more detailed courses take a great deal of commitment, we are very grateful to them for their efforts!

Our Eco-Committee meet each Friday in school, from January through to July, working on projects around the school in relation to the Green Flag award.

They have just carried out an environmental review of the school concentrating on the following aspects of our environment:

• Biodiversity
• Energy
• Global Citizenship
• Healthy Living
• Litter
• Marine
• School Grounds
• Green transport
• Preventing waste and recycling
• Saving and not polluting Water

We welcome parents with a particular interest in any of these areas to come and work with the children. This school year we are hoping to install a greenhouse, growing our own fruit and vegetables. Next term, we will have informative assemblies on marine conservation, Fairtrade and life in other countries.

The Mayor has confirmed that funded meals for Key Stage 2 pupils will continue for the next academic year, it is good to have that certainty for all of us.

You can book your child's meals through Schoolgrid.

I met with our catering company, Greenshaw, this week to sign a contract for another year. It was good to hear of their commitment to food standards and their success in achieving the MSC, Red Tractor and Food for Life certification.

The Parent Teacher Association recently funded our new projector for the hall, an £11k investment into a core resource. The new projector can cope with a much larger screen with a higher quality image. We look forward to investing in a new screen in the near future, it will involve some structural building work for which we have to seek support from our property consultant.

Our current projector has served us well for 12 years, thanks again to all our parents for your support with our numerous fundraisers which have made this investment possible.

Sports Day 2024 will take place at the David Weir Centre on Thursday 13th June for Years 1-6 from 08:40.

We will have lots more information for you nearer the time. Please note that there will not be transport to and from the event for children in childcare, please bear this in mind when booking childcare services in the summer term.

We've been coping with faulty gates for many months now and the good news is that our gates and fencing are all approved and ready for installation. Our property consultant, Eric Anderson (far left) from Synergy is shown above with some of the team involved in the installation, they were here for a final site visit today. They are all very experienced in working with schools and will work with us to ensure the safety of the children and the security of the school site.

We are grateful to the Archdiocese of Southwark and the DfE for their support with these projects which will get underway through the February half term and will last until the Easter holiday. Our containers will also be removed and new storage accomodation installed down the side of the building.

Prepare for a big change!

When we return after half term you will notice a big change as all of the vegetation at the front will have been removed. It will eventually be replaced by a line of laurel bushes across the whole front of the school, we expect these to take two to three years to reach their full height. In the interim, once the building work is complete, we will have a temporary fabric covering the new high security fencing. years 1 and 2 will not play in the front playground during the building work.

It's going to be a squeeze!

The Early Years gate will be removed immediately and parents for Nursery and Reception will need to use the main entrance gate to the school. Our double gates will also be taken out of action and replaced first.

We will come back to you next week with details of how we will attempt with the large numbers of people we have at the end of the day. In the mornings we will move to "drop and go" for all year groups apart from Nursery and Reception, please prepare for that, it would be good to practice next week!

Our PTA have news and information available on Facebook. Have you joined their group? You can find them through the link below.

A big thank you to all those parents who have registered for this scheme!

If you are a regular shopper at Sainsburys you can earn Cashback vouchers for both yourself and the school by registering your regular payment card in Sainsbury's with My School Fund.

£1 per £100 spend as a Cashback voucher for yourself.

£2 per £100 spend comes back to the school as a voucher!

Thanks to your donations through this scheme we have just installed a range oven for the children's cookery classes.

You can find more details in the video and brochure below.

In case you missed our article in the last newsletter, please be careful as new cameras have been installed at the hospice to help control parking!

London Road, Sutton, Surrey, SM3 9DL

Contact us:

General queries - office@stcecilias.school

Report an absence - absence@stcecilias.school

Anything finance - finance@stcecilias.school

Childcare - childcare@stcecilias.school

Special educational needs - send@stcecilias.school

Admissions - admissions@stcecilias.school

Website www.stcecilias.school

Phone: 020 8337 4566

February

Mon 5th - Y5 Mission Week

Fri 9th - PTA Disco for Years 3&4

Mon 12th - Fri 16th - Spring Half Term which includes Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.

Thurs 22nd - Guides may wear their uniform for the Worldwide Thinking Day

Fr 23rd - report card on Reading, Writing, Maths and attendance published for Y1-6.

Mon 26th - Y4 Mission Week

Thurs 29th - Guardian Consultations (Parent Teacher Meetings)

March

Tues 5th - Guardian Consultations (Parent Teacher Meetings)

Thurs 7th - Children's Lenten Liturgy - Y3-6

Mon 11th - Y4 to the Easter Story at the Baptist Church

Mon 18th - EYFS Special People Mission Week

Mon 18th - Final week of ECAs

Sat 23rd - PTA Eggstravaganza for EYFS and KS1

Weds 27th - End of term for Nursery

Thurs 28th - Y5 lead us in walking the Stations of the Cross, more news later.

Thurs 28th - School closes at Midday for Year R to 6, no after school childcare

Longer term important dates:

Monday 3rd June - Closed for training day

Thursday 13th June- Sports Day for Years 1-6 at David Weir Centre

You can find our term dates for this year and next on our website, link for you below. We have just one training day left for this year, this will be notified after Christmas, it will be in the Spring or Summer terms.