Weekly Information - Friday 9th September 2022
- All - School Photographs
- All - School Communication and Go4Schools
- All - Online Safety
- All - Kind Minds Newsletter
- All - PTA 50/50 Club
- All - International Artist shares his advice to our students
- All - Barton Tennis Club
- Year 12 - Business Trip to Old Trafford
- Y8 - Accelerated Reader Word Millionaires Celebrations
- Year 8 - Staffordshire Young Teen Fiction Award Celebration Day
We would like to remind you that the photographer will be in school to take student photographs next week on Tuesday 13th September.
Dear Parents/Carers,
Communication between school and parents has come a long way, with letters etc increasingly giving way to faster, multi-channel electronic communications via email and various online platforms and apps. It is therefore very important that the school have your current email contact details and we encourage all parents to download both the Schoolzine and Go4Schools Apps.
Schoolzine App
The Schoolzine App has useful links, including the news feed, newsletters and school calendar and will also enable parents to receive messages via the App (push notifications). Please visit the link below for instructions on how to download SZapp. It is vital that you do engage with this form of communication as we do not send paper copies of any communication home and rely on these push notification as well as email.
Go4Schools
Go4Schools is our online platform whereby you can view important information regarding student timetables, homework, behaviour, attendance and student progress and reports. Information about how to log into Go4Schools can be found on this link:
Go4Schools App
Again, if you have not already downloaded the Go4Schools App, there is a link below to their website where you can find details. The App should make use of the system far easier. At present you can only see information regarding student timetables, homework, attendance and behaviour, although other information is under development.
Weekly Information for Parents
We send out a weekly link to information for parents. This is normally sent on Friday each week by email and push notification to the Schoolzine App. Each message is tagged with the relevant year group, so you can navigate easily through and read only messages relevant to your child.
Parent Evening Appointments
Parents evenings will once again be completed remotely during this acadmic year using our ‘SchoolCloud’ system. Appointments will be made online by parents and you will be notified, by email and push notification, when the booking system for your child’s parents evening is open.
Website
Finally, don’t forget to regularly visit www.jths.co.uk for information, including all our latest news. You will also find links to access the above Apps and to ParentPay.
SchoolZine- Online Safety and Monitoring
Dear Parents,
I wanted to start the year by providing you with an overview of how we keep students safe in school online. We have a monitoring system called Securus, this monitors key strokes, applications and online searches on all school machines when they are connected to our network and when they are used elsewhere.
We have invested in a system that is also externally monitored by trained professionals who review captures, allocate them a Grade from 1-5, with 5 being a significant cause of concern. Any Grade 4 and Grade 5 captures are reported to myself as the Designated Safeguarding Lead and my Deputy DSL, Mrs Harrison. We review the information taken from the capture and will speak to students and parents where a level of risk is identified.
I also work closely with the IT team in school to review our layers of filtering in school. This includes reviewing websites and applications that students access in school. The vast majority of filtering is done at source and is based on a series of set parameters, but there are additional layers and changes we can make in school.
Online safety is a vital part of our school curriculum and safeguarding processes. All students will be taught about Online safety as part of our Personal Development curriculum. We also have a series of useful links for parents and students on our school website. In addition, we have the Report Harmful Content button located on the top of our webpage where parents and students can report harmful online content directly to social media platform.
Finally, I would like to ask you to keep your eyes out for Online Safety tips for parents that will be shared via SchoolZine. This week National Online Safety have shared an article for parents about Roblox, to read this please click the link below:
Best wishes,
Miss Dean
We would like to inform you that, as the PTA have now disbanded, the 50/50 club will no longer be running. Any funds paid in will be refunded, but no future draws will be taking place.
The Art and Design department was excited to host the highly successful international fine artist, John Waterhouse. John is a past student from John Taylor High school, he shared his creative journey to several year 8 art groups who were working on a project about ‘Creative Careers’.
John passionately spoke about being a fine artist, initially from working on building sites and painting in his spare time, to taking his paintings down to London and being taken on by several art galleries who continue to sell his work. The year 8 pupils were really enthused and engaged by his talk and asked him thoughtful questions. John also spoke to Year 12 art students, about both his career development but also giving them technical advice about painting to support their own subject knowledge. He spoke enthusiastically, telling them that he has the best job in the world and that ‘art is just brilliant’. We totally agree with this in the Art Department!
Barton Tennis Club would like to invite your family to Barton-Under-Needwood's Family Fun Open Day on Saturday 10th September 2022 from 13:30-15:00.
There will be sessions running simultaneously for all members of the family, plus a chance to have a chat to coaches and members about how to get involved further if you'd like to.
If you have any questions, or you'd like to book on, please email [email protected].
Looking forward to seeing you there!
The Microsports Team
Barton Tennis Club
At the end of last term, a group of Year 12 Business students undertook a trip to Old Trafford. This was their report:
We arrived in Manchester and we were all amazed by the size and the importance the stadium holds. We get off the coach and walked to the front of the stadium where we did a bag check. We collected our tickets and were shown to the museum where they held all of their trophies. We walked around the museum for half an hour looking into the history of the club and the origin story of the club's success. We looked at all of the trophies that they held which were amazing to see, whilst learning players history of how they helped to develop the team we know today.
Then, we began the tour of the stadium where we were first shown the pitch. We sat in the north stand which is also known as the Sir Alex Ferguson stand which was an amazing experience whilst we looked out onto the pitch and listened to our tour guide tell us the history of the stadium. It could hold up to 75,640 people and is the largest football league stadium in the UK and the eleventh largest in Europe.
We then made our way to the east stand where we got to experience the stadium from a different angle and took a group photo to remember the trip. After, we went to the west stand where our tour guide told us about the matches that were most successful and shaped their careers as well as the club's success. Our tour guide took us to the players' tunnel where we split into two lines and walked out the tunnel just as the players would do before they went out for a match.
We then walked through the press conference stand and made our way to the press conference room where our tour guide told us where everyone would be seated such as the journalists, Tv reporters and even the players. Our tour guide answered any questions that we had before we departed for lunch.
After lunch, we waited for the next part of our tour which included a presentation about the finance of the club. They have over 1.1 billion fans and followers worldwide who are divided by the club into two groups. Fans are people who are devoted to the team and they don’t support any other teams. They don’t need advertisement of merchandise or tickets because there is a high chance that they are already going to buy it so that they can represent their team. Followers are people who have the club as their second or third favourite because they are devoted to multiple different teams. We learnt about their marketing strategy and the way that they manage their social media accounts as a business. They wait before they join a new social media platform to see what the response of other teams are like such as their success and interactions that they get which results in more following due to the anticipation of the team. In the end, she answered any questions about favourite players and personal opinions about football before she thanked us all for coming. We left the stadium and got back on the coach to head back to our school.
It was a lovely trip and we learnt a lot about the finance of a football club and how they manage their marketing strategies. Thanks to Mr Astle for his hard work to make this trip possible for us and we are grateful for this oppurtunity.
Written by Year 12 BTEC Business
Last year's Year 7 engaged brilliantly with Accelerated Reader. As we approached the end of term, we had 61 word millionaires, a new school record and a new personal best individual word count of 7.9 million words. Quizzing was left open over the summer in case any students want to set themselves the challenge of adding to their individual word counts and also becoming word millionaires.
All of our word millionaires were treated to a celebration breakfast recently in recognition of their hard work and the 22 students who are double or more word millionaires were also taken on a rewards trip to Spalding Books in Barton as a treat. All our word millionaires were asked to nominate a book that they would like to see in the LRC at school and have been given the opportunity to be the first to read those books once they've been added to stock. We hope our now Year 8's will continue to enjoy their reading this year, having set a record which our new intake will need to rise to.
Nine of our keenest readers from last year's Year 7 attended the Staffs YTF Award Celebration Day at RAF Cosford at tghe end of term. Our students read the six books on the shortlist and were able to listen to talks from three of those shortlisted authors. They also had the opportunity to have books signed by either Alex Foulkes, Joseph Elliott or Nicola Penfold, visit the museum, dress up and take part in a YTF quiz. The group were pleased that they'd chosen the overall winner, "All Our Hidden Gifts" by Caroline O'Donaghue, as our group's favourite. Two of our students Megan and Aleeza were awarded a certificate and YTF badge for being YTF champions. A great day out was had by all.