As part of our commitment to continuous school improvement, our aim this session is to keep parents and carers up to date with the latest school administrative/business news on a weekly basis. As such, this concise weekly HT Update will be published every Friday afternoon with a simple opportunity for you to also feedback/ask questions via the link at the bottom of each Update. Feedback received, where appropriate, will be responded to and published on Monday afternoons on the school website link.

Key messages from this week

Shared HT Role: This week I began, in earnest, with my two year role with Midlothian Council. For the school this means that I will not be in Lasswade almost every Tuesday and Thursday. On these days Ms Mitchell will fulfil the Head Teacher role.

School Calendar: As outlined last week we are working with the Midlothian Digital Team to share our whole school calendar with parents/carers via our website. The current issue is around security settings and only shows events as ‘busy’. As a temporary fix we have put an August and September link at the top of the calendar to allow parents/carers to view events on those months click here

Year Assemblies: On Wednesday and Thursday of this week we held Year Group Assemblies with all students. Our Year Heads delivered a consistent and generally positive, message to all students. Our themes included; reflections on a positive end of term in May/June, an excellent effort to date on school uniform, a reminder of our Core Expectations, the importance of our new school values, Chromebook expectations and finally details on our wider achievement and extracurricular opportunities. All Years also had 1 or 2 bespoke messages relevant to their stage.

Parent/Carer Survey: You may remember that just after Easter 2022 you were asked to complete a survey to gather your views on aspects of the life and work of the school. This is an important part of our work and helps to shape how we aim to improve the school. For example, this weekly publication is a direct response to not enough parents/carers feeling they are informed about what’s happening at school. In June the results were discussed at the Parent Council.
All parent/carers are now able to see the survey results via a post on our website click here.

Parent Council: Details on the dates/times of our six Parent Council Meetings this session are on our website click here. You’ll see from the post that we are adopting a hybrid model of ‘in-person’ and ‘virtual’ meetings this session. The Parent Council is a crucial part of our school and I’d encourage as many parents/carers as possible to attend.

School Photographs: On Monday and Tuesday of next week we welcome Coldwells back into the school. This is the local company we use for school photographs. All students will have their individual photographs taken at some point across either day. These images are then uploaded to our management system where student information is held. Some group photographs will also be taken. As always parents/carers will have the opportunity to order/purchase relevant images. Please see our website for additional information click here.

If you have any feedback/questions relating to this update please submit them via the link below

Feedback here

Take Care
Campbell Hornell and Ali Mitchell, Head Teachers