Newsletter-2016-07.Pdf

July 2016 Dear Parents & Guardians hank you to everyone who has supported students through their exams, trips, activities or work experience in what is T often the busiest term of all. We have welcomed trips safely back from Morocco, Croatia, around the UK on the Duke of Edinburgh Award, Barcelona and later this week we expect trips home from the Brecon Beacons and the North Coast of France. At the same time we see off the trips to New York, Tanzania and the Gold D of E to Scotland. We are so very lucky to have staff, students and families willing to engage in this vibrant part of life at King Alfred's. The Music and Dance shows were great successes and thank you to all who took part or attended - thoroughly enjoyable evenings were had by all. We also welcomed all of our new Year 6 students and families whilst saying goodbye to our Year 13’s at their Leavers' Ball, and celebrated with Year 11 at their Prom. They were all wonderful evenings and all the staff felt extremely proud of all of our students. We are grateful to the small group of parents who recently offered up their time and attended an evening to review our new website before we move towards the launch. They provided really valuable and detailed feedback, Inside this issue: which we are now working on, but I am pleased to say that the overall response was Social Media Guidance 3 that the new site looks to be a significant Year 7/8 News 4 improvement! We hope that the new website will be up and running early in September. Oxfordshire Voices 5 Festival On a similar note, we have started this month Creative Arts 8-10 with our regular slot on e-safety. This first article is about Social Media guidance for History 11 parents and which we will be visiting more Year 9 Stockmarket 12 closely during Anti-bullying month in November. I hope that you find it useful. Women in Engineering 13 KING ALFRED’S ACADEMY Please don't forget that last month in First First Thursday Thursday we gave details of a very powerful Sports Results 14- site for parents set up by Vodafone, which you may find time to explore over the summer. What’s On 17- 22 (Continued on page 2) Finally, we have completed our new assessment plan for all year groups, and we will be publishing this to parents in September on the website, by email and at the parent information evenings. Your feedback from all of the surveys has been very useful, and I hope, like the website, that you will see the real improvements that we have worked on to help students make good progress, and for parents to understand their child's progress. We wish you all a safe and happy summer and we look forward to seeing you on Results Days or in the new academic year. Jo Halliday Headteacher July Lottery Winners 1 Middleton ( M ) £250 Prize 2 Rennie ( B & CA) £50 Prize 3 Ley ( JA&PJ) £50 Prize 4 Nunn-Price ( Mrs ) £50 Prize 5 Fennell ( C) £25 Prize Page 2 Social Media Guidance nline social networks, such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram are playing an increasingly important part in many of our lives. Children and young people, we accept, find them extremely O attractive and correctly used, such networks have many positive benefits. However, they open up a whole range of social and pastoral issues which we are having to deal with on a more frequent basis. In order to do the best we can to keep children safe online, parents and children (including older children) need to be aware of the following: 1. Whatever is written online remains traceable permanently, and is potentially visible to everyone. Posting certain comments or images on sites such as those mentioned above can quite easily lead to someone committing a criminal offence and the evidence trail is extremely easy to follow. 2. Ultimately, schools have no power to control what a student puts on their own computer/mobile device outside school hours. However, we have a duty to investigate the misuse of online social media where it results in bullying or abusive behaviour involving our students; this includes the use of such media outside school hours. 3. Most social media sites require the user to be at least 13 years of age. Users who are under 13 years of age break the terms of the site’s use. If children give a false age in order to open an account they will be exposed to material deemed to be suitable for that false age. So if a child of 8 claims to be 13, parents need to be aware that once that child actually reaches 13 years of age, they will have access to all 18+ adult material. Our understanding is that Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram all require the user to be 13 years of age, and therefore it is clear that many Year 7 and Year 8 students are using these sites against the advice that is put in place to protect them. For students old enough to use social networking sites, we suggest the following specific guidance be followed: a. Different social network sites have different age limits for users. Parents should make themselves aware of the limits on sites their children are using. The NSPCC NetAware site (http://www.netaware.org.uk/) has detailed information on the majority of social networking sites and we recommend you visit this site to familiarise yourselves with the sites or apps that your children are using. b. Students must regularly ensure their privacy settings are at the maximum – parents can double check by downloading the apps and trying to access their child’s site. c. Students must never disclose their full name, age, date of birth, phone number, e-mail address, address, school or any other personal data. They should be aware that they can be identified by those not known to them if they upload photos of themselves or others and they do not have their privacy settings correctly set. d. The ‘places’ setting on Facebook, and on other sites where such a feature exists, should be disabled as viewers of posts may be able to locate your child. e. Students setting up groups or message walls must ensure that the content of those pages is not abusive, bullying or offensive to any general reader, even if it is deemed acceptable to the members of the group. f. Parents are encouraged to talk to their children about how they use social networking sites, to check regularly the type of content their children are exposed to online and to support the Schools in their efforts to keep students safe on line. g. As a ‘rule of thumb’, the standard of behaviour we expect is that any material accessed or comments made ought to be suitable to be displayed to the public and should not include anything a student wouldn’t show a young sibling or grandparents. Finally – most parents are paying for their child’s mobile phone. Knowing that you will occasionally scroll through (as opposed to scrutinising) to check their online safety, will encourage most children to meet the “rule of thumb” described above. Page 3 A Hair Cut for Little Princess Trust elissa Quinn, Year 8 ,decided that she would like to donate her hair to Little Princess Trust when she next had her hair M cut, so on her 13th birthday later this month she is going to give some other child a present, her hair, which will be made into a wig that can be worn by a young person undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Melissa wants to support children with cancer and also raise awareness of young people coping with mental health issues by also raising sponsorship for her upcoming haircut that she will donate to “Young Minds”. Young Minds is the UK’s leading campaigning charity committed to improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health of children and young people. The organisation provides a range of services to improve mental health, including a Parent Helpline which is a lifeline to thousands of parents every year, providing information and support. We are all very proud of Melissa, a generous and caring young lady, who feels it is an ideal opportunity to raise funds and donate to two very worthwhile causes. Well done Melissa from all of us! Anyone wishing to donate through sponsoring Melissa’s haircut should visit: https://www.justgiving.com/Graham-Quinn3? utm_source=Sharethis&utm_medium=fundraisingpage&utm_content=Graham-n3&utm_campaign=pfp -email Year 7 Visit Barcelona t the end of June, 60 bold Year 7 linguists travelled to Barcelona. Students experienced the A very best of the Spanish sunshine, visited famous sites including the ‘Sagrada Familia’ and ‘Camp Nou’, tasted delicious tapas and spent a day at the Port Aventura theme park. We were so impressed by how students embraced the language and culture. Our hosts during the tapas tasting were absolutely beaming throughout as they watched the students throw themselves into the experience and were taken aback by the huge round of applause from our Year 7s at the end. These comments from students sum the trip up nicely! The Modern Foreign Languages Team “I loved the trip because I had never been so far away from home on my own and also it was my first time out of the country other than France and for so long. I also enjoyed the bus journey because we were all so cheerful…I really enjoyed it!” “The trip was ‘estupendo’ because the activities were fun and well planned.” “Best time of my life.

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