This year celebrated 25 years of World Book Day. I have been hearing amazing stories of how our schools have made this year a great event. Saltdean Primary's World Book Day celebrations centred around a Choose Kind theme and the book We're All Wonders by RJ Palacio. Children made Choose Kind displays, performed random acts of kindness and complimented their classmates to help them feel good. Children came to school in their PJs for lots of cosy reading and stories and there was a whole school book swap. Children made potato book characters and displayed them in the classroom and all had a Wonderful day!
Saltdean Primary's celebrations
At Rudyard Kipling Primary School, pupils and staff were inspired by the book Clean Up by Dapo Adeola which explores plastic pollution and its effects on the ocean. They produced books and posters with ideas on how to save the planet as well as creating sea creatures out of junk materials, map making and drama. A Year 6 child said, “I like how the book motivates me to go outside and help make a difference in the world!”
Rudyard Kipling Primary's celebrations
New Poverty Proofing Network for Brighton and Hove
The Poverty Proofing Network has recently been set up to build on the work developed through the “Poverty Proofing the School Day” audits and to explore ways to further support disadvantaged children and families across the city. It is open to all schools in Brighton and Hove to share the good practice that is already taking place and to hear about initiatives that are happening within the city and beyond. The meetings take place once every half-term and are centred around a topic chosen by members of the network. The theme of the last meeting was “food”, and we had a presentation from the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, with information about ways to support families, such as accessing emergency food parcels, low-cost shopping hubs across the city and the Household Support Fund. For more information, please contact ashley.seymour-williams@brighton-hove.gov.uk
Young Carers Rocks Cabaret Show
Wednesday 16 March was Young Carers Action Day and The Young Carers Project, alongside Brighton and Hove City Council, put on ‘The Young Carers Rocks Cabaret Show’. It was an event to celebrate all the amazing work that young carers in Brighton and Hove do and to put on a show for young carers and their families to enjoy. For many it was a night out that often isn’t possible, and a chance to relax and have fun. There were also awards presented to young carers, as well as a world premiere of a film to promote young carers made by a young carer himself, and an outstanding song performed by a young carer which left few dry eyes in the house.
Make Your Mark Campaign
The Youth Council have been working very hard on encouraging young people to vote in the Make Your Mark Campaign. More than 1800 young people from Brighton and Hove took part in the UK Youth Parliaments national ballot, which is the biggest survey of young people’s views. Members of the Youth Council had meetings in their schools with teachers to plan the best way forward to encourage young people to vote. The top four issues voted for in Brighton and Hove are: 1. health and wellbeing; 2. education and learning; 3. jobs, money, homes and opportunities and 4. the environment. Thank you to all the teachers that gave up their time to help with the campaign.
Addressing Educational Disadvantage: Helping Pupils to Thrive in Our Schools and Classrooms
We were thrilled to welcome Marc Rowland to Brighton and Hove for our spring term school and colleges leaders’ business meeting earlier this month. Marc explored the theme of addressing educational disadvantage: how we can make a difference through a whole school approach and an attention to pupils’ experiences every day in school and in the classroom. Marc will be working with some of our schools over the next few months through a project commissioned by Brighton and Hove City Council with the Durrington Research School. He will also be presenting to our aspiring leaders at our forthcoming conference “Lessons in Leadership” at the University of Sussex.
CityWide Year 6-7 Literacy Transition Project
Literacy unit planning
Teachers from primary and secondary schools have recently come together at Varndean School to plan Literacy units to support the transition of our Year 6 pupils on their next stage of learning. It was a positive and productive afternoon of collaboration that resulted in three units of planning being produced. These are all based on the book Happy Here, a collection of short stories introduced by Sharna Jackson. All Brighton and Hove schools will receive these plans with accompanying teaching resources early in the summer term and this will be followed by online sessions for teachers to attend so they feel fully confident in teaching the units. I look forward to hearing how this goes!
Power of Reading – Celebration Event
Ten primary schools celebrated the success of implementing the Power of Reading in their schools over the last few years. Despite disruptions caused by the pandemic, the schools were able to receive the training from Centre for Literacy in Primary Education online. This great work has continued this year through partnership with Brighton and Hove Teaching and Learning Consultants and Lead Teachers from Associate PoR School, Rudyard Kipling. Schools have embarked on lesson studies with partner schools to support their own practice and further embed this approach across their whole school. Thank you to all schools involved – the event was a huge success! Schools can email Joyti.Azad@brighton-hove.gov.uk if they would like to be involved in Cohort 2 of this project.
Hearing the Voice of Care Experienced Young People
Sussex University session
Hannah and Josh at the annual social workers conference
Brighton and Hove Primary Cross Country Team – Sussex School Games Finals
Virtual School Foster Carer Webinar – 17 March
The Virtual School delivered its annual Foster Carer Conference virtually on Thursday 17 March. The day was a great success, weaving together attachment and trauma aware presentations from Karen Milton and Michael Reeves, along with a demonstration of Worth Publishing's new Reach4Care Awareness & Behaviour platform from Andrea Perry. This tool offers quick access to explanations and strategies for supporting young people drawn from a wealth of expertise. The Virtual School will be granting carers free access to this new platform in the coming weeks; more information on the Reach4Care platform can be found here.
In the afternoon, there was a hugely engaging and thought provoking conversation facilitated by Camille Kumar, followed by an inspiring presentation from Claire Williams and Jamie Wilson on the psychology of praise, which gave us yet more food for thought. Resources and links from the webinar will be available soon.
St Margaret’s Football Success
The St Margaret’s Year 6 mixed football team
Congratulations to St Margaret’s CE Primary School’s Year 6 mixed football team who have made it through to the national finals of a football tournament. The team won the Brighton and Hove small schools’ tournament in October, going on to win the Sussex-wide tournament in January, before finishing as runners up at the South East Regional Championships in London this month and progressing through to the national finals.
The finals are due to take place at a Premier League football ground in the Midlands where the team will take on some of the best school teams across the country. Rachel Kershaw, Headteacher at St Margaret’s has said “They are a huge credit to the school, displaying outstanding teamwork, sportsmanship and determination and everyone at St Margaret's is so proud of them”. Good luck to the team for the finals and I look forward to hearing how they get on.
Brighton & Hove School Baton Relay
I was so pleased to hear about the progress of the Brighton and Hove School Baton Relay, organised by Coldean Primary School, which has been taking place across the city’s schools this month. The relay will visit every school across Brighton and Hove in the run up to the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham later this year. The baton left Coldean on 8 March to head to BACA and will return on 7 July after it has visited all 68 schools in the city. As they pass on the baton, each school will also pass on a message of hope and inspiration
The children at Coldean designed the baton and ensured it represented elements of the city they felt were important. They created a reworking of Ian Dury’s ‘Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3’ as their message of hope. This can be viewed on the school Facebook page. A local artist then turned the children's designs into a 3D baton, made out of brass. I look forward to hearing more about the relay over the coming weeks.
Early Help Review Update – where are we now?
Our consultant led review of the Early Help system for children and families in Brighton and Hove is now in its final stages. The review has helped to identify lots of amazing work with families and given us the building blocks to think about how we may want to do things in the future, in line with the key national drivers including the Best Start for Life, Supporting Families Programme and Family Hubs. We are also closely linking this work to the wider disadvantage strategy development. We will be using co-production to inform our approach, transformation and delivery plan and will be hosting co-production workshops over the coming months where a range of stakeholders, including schools from across the city, will be invited to be involved.
Let’s Dance
This term saw the return of the eagerly anticipated and celebrated event Let’s Dance, which took place at the Brighton Dome from Monday 14 - Friday 18 March. In a week-long festival which celebrated and showcased dance from the children in our city, a total of 1,745 young people from the schools across Brighton and Hove took to the stage. Young people aged from 4–18 danced to packed auditoriums of over 900 audience members each night. I look forward to seeing and hearing more about the dances which took place.
Schools White Paper
On Monday 28 March the Government published the Schools White Paper, Opportunity for All: strong schools with great teachers for your child. This sets out the long term vision that 90% of primary school children will achieve the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, and in secondary schools, the national GCSE average in both English language and maths will increase to 5 by 2030. The four pillars of the plan are to ensure an excellent teacher for every child, high standards of curriculum, behaviour and attendance, targeted support for every child who needs it and a stronger and fairer school system. There is much for school leaders, governors and our wider education partners to consider in this paper, and we look forward to discussing the details and exploring the implications over the coming months.
Ofsted have been very busy in the city. Kings School, Blatchington Mill School, Stanford Infants School, Mile Oak Primary School, Brackenbury Primary School and St Peter's Primary School have all recently been inspected. We look forward to the publication of the reports.
Welcomes and Goodbyes
I would like to welcome to Robert Hardy as the new Chair of the Brighton and Hove Schools Forum. We look forward to working closely with Robert over the coming months.
We say goodbye and thank you this month to Anne Cox who is stepping down as Head Teacher of Queen's Park Primary School at Easter. Anne has been Headteacher at Queen’s Park for 15 years and will be much missed by colleagues across the city. I would like to thank her for her commitment to the school and the wider Brighton and Hove Education Partnership and wish her all the best for a very happy and well earned retirement.
Anne Cox
Best wishes,
Jo
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