HT Update: Week-ending Friday 25th October 2024

Friday 25th October 2024

This concise weekly HT Update is generally published every Friday afternoon.   It’s 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 afternoon on the school website.  

Key messages from this week  

Calendar:  Significant events week beginning 28/10/24;  on Monday, Thursday and Friday S2 students will work with Royal Navy personnel on team building, leadership and problem solving activities;  on Tuesday 45, S3 students will continue their focussed work with Tree of Knowledge,  Advanced Higher Drama students are on their theatre trip, we have S4/S5/S5 Year Assemblies that needed to rescheduled from this week and it’s our Parent Council 2 Meeting, see below;  on Friday our S3 Media students will visit Sky Academy in Livingston.  

Staffing:  This week we welcomed two new Learning Assistants, Rebecca Lennon will be working in the POD and Emma Fairbairn within Creative Learning. On Monday we will be joined by Kerri Malcolm, who will work between LHS and Burnbrae PS as our Home School Practitioner.   

Parent Council 2: Our second Parent Council Meeting of the session will be on Tuesday 29th October, in-person at LHS from 7.00pm. Further details available on the website, click here.

Google Guardian: S4 parents should have received their first Google Guardian summary today. If you haven’t, then please check that you have accepted your invite – it will have come from Google, not school – you might have missed it, or it might have gone into your junk.  Summaries should offer the opportunity for you to discuss your child’s learning with them but please also remember that, as this is a trial, staff are adjusting their Google Classroom practice to ensure that the information provided on summaries is useful. It may take us a couple of weeks to ensure that historic information doesn’t show. We will seek your feedback in the coming weeks.  Our plan is to roll out this service to all year groups by January 2025. 

Assessment Calendar: Our Senior Phase Assessment Calendar is now live, click here. You should see that there are three ‘assessment windows’, these are:

• 25th November – 6th December
• 6th January – 31st January
• 10th March – 14th March

Teachers should make it clear to classes when their assessments are, but these also follow our assessment column model. Students in S4-6 will have an Assembly next week where the Assessment Calendar will be explained. In addition, a full timetable of Study Classes will be published next week.

S4 Student Progress Consultation Evening:  Our online Parents-Booking system has been set up and ready for the S4 consultation evening on Wednesday 6th November.  Please see a separate post on our website, click here.

Summer 2025 School Show:  This week we were pleased  to announce that this year’s Summer 2025 School Show is ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’.  This opportunity is open to all students from all year groups to apply to be part of the cast.   Students are asked to sign up via a Google Form that will be posted on all Year Group Classrooms.  Auditions will begin with S4-S6 students and will take place on Monday 11th November with dates t.b.c for younger students. 

Reminder, Midlothian Budget:  As you may be aware, Midlothian Council has a projected budget gap for 2025/26 estimated to be £9.406m and, moving forward, there will be difficult decisions to be taken to enable Midlothian to continue to deliver statutory and non-statutory services. At a Full Council meeting on Tuesday 8th October Elected Members agreed to commence a public consultation seeking to understand the impact savings proposals will have on you and inform their final decisions.  The proposals will potentially have a significant impact on all schools.  The public consultation is now live on the Council’s website and I encourage you to complete the survey in order that your views are considered.

Consultations – Tell us how our savings proposals would impact you | Midlothian Council

 

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

Feedback here

Take Care

Campbell Hornell,  Head Teacher

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