Dear Parents and Carers s18

Dear Parents and Carers,

We have had some lovely events here at Old Hall School to celebrate Christmas, but we have also kept up the pace on our schools development, I would like to keep you updated on our work with your children in this newsletter.

Snow and ice

Thank you all for your patience and understanding during the recent snow and ice that we have had which resulted in some days being lost for your children to come to school. We will never take the decision to close the school lightly and we will always try and make the decision to close as early as we can to help you make arrangements for your children. Please keep a close eye on the website or ‘our Walsall’ Facebook page for daily information and listen to local radio for updates. We need to balance our need to open the school with the health and safety needs of our vulnerable children and staff on site, but we also have to take advice from transport who will tell us if they feel it is safe for their buses to drive in snowy weather. Many thanks to Dave our dedicated site manager and a team of staff from school who spent a whole afternoon shovelling snow so that we could be open to children before other schools did.

Transport changes

Walsall has now agreed a single provider to look after all school transport for SEN children across the authority. The new provider SMT will take over transport for all children at Old Hall in the new term. It was good to meet many of you on the information day on the 6th December, Waseem and the team took the time to explain to us what the changes would mean but also to highlight the fact that there would be a fleet of brand new buses for our children with enhanced safety features including CCTV and a fleet tracker app to keep tabs on all buses in case of emergency.

There will be a new team of drivers and passenger assistants to take over the new routes after Christmas but the team will be practising their new routes before the first pick up and will aim to knock on your door and introduce themselves to you. We will also have a single point of contact to sort out any issues as they arise, you can email Waseem on [email protected] but please contact Sharon Barrett or myself on the school number as well.

1 School building programme

The special school expansion report went to Walsall cabinet this week and the ‘prescribed alterations’ to Old Hall Schools has been approved, the leader thanked everyone for the hard work that is going on and that he was pleased that Walsall LA is taking the lead on the school place expansions projects. We can now begin to work with our architect to develop a plan of the proposed extension and I will be sharing plans with staff and parents as soon as they are available. We expect that there will be three new classes and a sensory room in the plans to raise pupil numbers to 104 in September 2018.

School development priorities

Every year all schools produce a school development plan to share the targets they are working on. Following our Ofsted visit last summer we have some very clear targets to meet:

Attendance: Thank you for your support on this, attendance figures are improving, especially for pupils with more complex needs. Please can I ask you not to book time for holidays during the school term unless there are special circumstances – if permission is refused, then we will have to record an unauthorised absence. Please do contact me if you are unsure on this.

Curriculum: Teachers and subject leaders have a curriculum responsibility area and have worked to develop new systems to ensure that children are making good or outstanding progress across all subject areas, as well as producing a special and exciting curriculum to help all our children learn to their potential.

Additional government funding: Our pupil premium and the sports premium has been used effectively on a range of strategies (Ofsted 2017). We now need to make sure that everyone receives greater clarity about the specific effect all initiatives have had on pupils’ outcomes so you can identify what has given good value and is worthwhile to continue, and has the most impact on learning.

Safeguarding team update:

Christmas time can bring new gaming opportunities to lots of children, with the most popular gift to ask for being an Xbox or iPad or some sort of on-line gaming tool or app. To help us all have a happy and on-line safe Christmas we have given you a link to the ‘keeping children safe on-line’ page from the NSPCC. This article will help you find out about the risks of online gaming, how to decide what games are best for your child and ways to keep them safe. Have a safe & happy Christmas - The Safeguarding team – Old Hall School https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/online- safety/online-games-helping-children-play-safe/

2 Christmas Enterprise Day

Thank you to all staff and parents who made this such a good occasion, we had to rearrange the day due to the weather, but we didn’t want to let all of the good work done by class teams go to waste, so thank you all for coming to the rearranged day. A big thank you to Kellie and all of the Elephants team who organised and sorted a huge donation of Christmas items from Poundland to support the event.

Christmas concert

Thanks to Bev Cullen our music teacher and Laura Payne who organised the whole school to prepare and present a Christmas concert for parents. I was very proud that all children in school had an opportunity to perform on stage in front of parents. We ended the event with a very successful raffle organised by Jayne and Rachel in the school admin team. Parents and local businesses have been very generous and we have raised a total of£1321.50 for us to spend on exciting activities at Old Hall School thank you so much for your support!

Teacher Arrangements

As you know we are very sad to be saying goodbye to Kerry Jefferson and Laura Payne, both of whom have been promoted to leadership positions in other schools – we wish them every success in this. In the meantime Penguins will be led by Lyn Hale. Lyn will contact Penguin parents in the new term but has prepared this week by working with Laura and the Penguins team to ensure a good transition so that she can continue the great work going on in class in the New Year.

3 Christmas activities

Class teams have been working hard to make sure that all of our children have a great time at Christmas; some classes have been challenged to go outside of school with their group to take part in a range of activities. Here are some pictures of Dolphins class visiting a special person at Lodge Farm JMI.

Welcome to new staff

A warm welcome to Lyn Hale and Helen Moxon - I know you will enjoy working at Old Hall as much as I do; we are looking forward to you joining the team.

Upcoming dates for your Diary:

Pupils return to school on Monday 8th January (remember there will be new transport arrangements!)

INSET Dates to July 2018 – School is closed for pupils on these dates:

Monday 23rd July – Positive Handling for Staff

Tuesday 24th July – Curriculum Development.

Finally.....

On behalf of all of the team here at Old Hall School, I would like to thank you all for your support for us as we move to the New Year – we have lots to do to ensure that your children receive the very highest standards of education and care and with our strong parent partnership we are well placed to do so. Wishing a very happy and restful Christmas and New Year break

Very best wishes

4 Clive