HT Weekly Update: Week-ending Friday 1st March 2024

Friday 1st March 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 each Monday on the school website link.   

Key messages from this week  

Calendar:  Events next week include:  on Tuesday the NHS Team are in supporting the Teenage Booster Vaccination programme,  our Student Voice S1 and S3 Year Councils will also take place;  on Wednesday we’ll hold Student Voice Year Councils with S5 and S6,  in addition our Industry Insights sessions continue;   on Thursday Mrs Sharp will accompany students to their Career Ready Graduation in Edinburgh,  we’ll also hold Student Voice Year Councils with S2 and S4.  

Staffing:   Congratulations on the safe arrival of Imogen Innes’s (Modern Languages) baby boy earlier this week.  Both mother and son are doing well.  Best wishes to Jamie Casey (Mathematics) who leaves Lasswade today and moves onto new opportunities. 

EfL Parent/Carer Survey:  The Midlothian Equipped for Learning project has supplied every student in our school with a device for learning and helped staff and students make the most of these Chromebooks. The Equipped for Learning Team want to hear your views on what has gone well, what has not gone well, and how we can prioritise planned actions to best support learning as the project moves forward. The survey will take no more than ten minutes to complete.  Please click here to complete it.

First News: First News is a newspaper, aimed at those aged 7-14. Our students can download a weekly edition to their Chromebook completely free using the unique ID given to our school. We have added a shortcut to Chromebooks and users may also wish to bookmark this page on their own devices. As well as a weekly newspaper, students can also access the full First News archive and use a clipping tool to select relevant articles, sharing these to Google Classrooms. It is a brilliant resource, perfect for independent reading, discussing current events, homework tasks and research.  Teachers have been distributing the access code to interested students.  From Monday we’ll place the code in Year Group Classrooms. 

Access to Wi-Fi: Technical work has now commenced that will restrict Wi-Fi access to Midlothian owned devices only. For students this means Wi-Fi access only through their Chromebook.  It means that any devices that currently connect to the school Wi-Fi, that are not Midlothian owned, will no longer be able to connect. We’ve asked staff and students not to connect any personal devices to the school Wi-Fi.

Healthy Respect Drop-In at Lasswade High School:  As I’m sure you’d expect, we work closely with our school nurse to support young people in accessing health services.  From March 21st, our school nurse will be launching a Healthy Respect drop-in service aimed at supporting students.  This will run on Thursdays between 12.05pm and 1.45pm. The Drop-in is a ‘safe place’ for young people to talk about sexual health and relationships.  Students who self-refer will be provided a friendly, confidential service.  The school nurse can also provide students with free condoms, pregnancy testing and advice.  This is a confidential service but if the adults running the drop-in have any safeguarding concerns, they will share information in line with our established Child Protection guidelines.  This drop-in is designed to supplement other local services which include the Healthy Respect + Young People’s Clinic which runs from Croft Street, Dalkeith on Tuesdays, 4pm-7pm and Fridays, 1pm–4pm.

International Women’s Day: International Women’s Day is on Friday 8th March. This is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women, with this year’s campaign titled ‘Inspire Inclusion’. Our Equalities Group will create a display in the Atrium identifying the names of inspirational women, linked to our curriculum areas,  to help inspire our young people to opt for subjects in school and beyond. These are likely to be women throughout history or who are currently making contributions.

School day Consultation:  A reminder that the Midlothian wide consultation on aligning the school day across all 6 secondary schools closes on Friday 8th March.  Details are available via our website, click here.  I am recommending that you support the proposal and am asking for as many parent’s  and carers as possible to respond, click here.

School Photographs.  Coldwells have asked us to share the following information for those purchasing the leavers set package,  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,  Head Teacher

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