Weekly Information - Friday 8th March 2024
The following students celebrated their achievements with Mrs Cochrane this week, congratulations to them all!
Joe 10A
Fredide 10A
Zara 10A
Oliver 10A
Ethan 10A
Sadie 7Y
Today’s Hot Chocolate with the Head was all about our awesome Year 10 students who have been put through their paces and raised money for charity.
Joe, Freddie, Zara, Oliver and Ethan have all been nominated by Mr Roberts, their Form Tutor, for completing a military fitness challenge to raise money for the Jerry Green Dog Rescue. Through sponsorship, the group of five managed to raise a total of £150 which will contribute to their running charity total within their form group which is now over £1000.
The military style course included 6 rounds of pull-ups, shuttle runs, tricep dips and sit-ups which was a real challenge for the pupils. Mr Roberts was extremely proud of how the team took on the exercises showing a lot of determination throughout. Mr Roberts and volunteers from his form have also completed a 5km run and plan to run a sweet shop to raise more funds for selected charities.
Mrs Cochrane was really impressed with the groups efforts and re-enforced how raising money for charity shows kindness, which is one of the school’s core values. It was also great to hear the group talk about what subjects they enjoy at school which included; DT, Health & Social, English, IT and Business, and how they are managing their revision and looking towards the future.
Well done to all the students for being nominated, you have gone above & beyond and should be really proud of yourself.
Local Primary School Mixed Football
On Wednesday 6th March, we welcomed a group of Year 5 & 6 pupils from Needwood, Rangemore & Walton to join us for an evening of Football fun!
The sessions, led by our Sports Leaders and Young Sporting Ambassadors, started with a warm up and some practice sessions which the primary pupils really enjoyed. It was great to see so much enthusiasm in the build up to the match.
During the games, the level of skill and team-spirit from the primary pupils was phenomenal. It was great to hear them talking about tactics and supporting each other from start to finish with lots of cheering and high-fives!
It was the responsibility of our Sports Leaders to lead the warm-ups, organise the heats, keep track of the scores, and award the winning team with a trophy and certificates. Our Sports Leaders really wanted to make the event a memorable experience for the primary pupils and inspire them to continue their passion for football.
Thank you and well done to all those involved!
What an awesome day celebrating World Book Day! We had our Flash Fiction event, Book on a Door Competition, Book Trails, Dressing Up Competition, Short Story Writing, Bake a Book Competition, and the chance for our students to exchange their book tokens.
Thank you to Mrs Collier, LRC Manager, and her team for making the day come alive and organising lots of events for our students to get involved in. Mrs Collier said ‘World Book Day is always an important event at JTHS. It's a fantastic way to get the whole school involved and share a love of reading, through creative competitions and dressing up as book characters. Students love seeing staff get dressed up and involved in sharing a love of books.
A special shoutout goes to our winners of the following competitions:
Year 7 Dressing Up Winner Rebekah Y7
Staff Dressing Up Winner Miss Sears
Bake a Book Competition Winner Delta and Louisa Y10
Book On A Door Winners: Year 7 7H with War Horse, Year 8T with Bone Sparrow, Year 9 9O with The Midnight Library, Y10 10S with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Short Story Competition Winner Harry Y7
Staff Book Trail Competition Winner Fatimah Y7
Our final World Book Day event took place on Monday 11th March where we have the pleasure of welcoming Bali Rai, author of over 40 books for children, who will be doing creative writing workshops and leading assembly sessions.
Thank you to all our staff and students for taking part and making the events a success. Take a look through our pictures below!
On Thursday 7th March, Mrs Bostock and her team of students tested their programming skills for the annual Raspberry Pi competition, an initiative by PA Consulting.
The competition is a celebration of STEM education, 'giving school children the tools and opportunity to invent products that can benefit society. Using engineering and coding skills and a Raspberry Pi microcomputer; students put their ingenuity to the test to come up with inspiring solutions to global challenges.'
This years competition is all about Healthcare and inventing a product that will help improve health and well-being. The students wrote the code and programmed the computer to control and monitor the temperature of a thermometer when touched. The thermometer has lots of uses in healthcare and wellbeing and can be used in a variety of settings.
With Computer Science being such a male dominated industry, it was great to see our female students doing the testing, an very well timed as we celebrate International Women's Day today. Well done and thank you to Cara, Ilori and Emilia!
The next phase of the project is now to enter it into the competition where the JTHS team will be up against other schools nationally. Good luck to all!
To find out more about the Raspberry Pi competition click here: PA Raspberry Pi Competition | PA Consulting
National Careers Week
This week our pupils have been taking part in a variety of sessions in lessons and form time as part of National Careers Week, led by Mrs Ball, Subject Leader CEIAG.
National Careers Week is a one-week celebration that aims to provide focus for careers options at an important stage in the academic calendar. The resources available to schools help to support young people develop awareness and excitement about their future pathways.
Our pupils have had the opportunity to watch a number of real-life relatable videos showing a variety of different career choices. These include, Business Management, Engineering, Architecture, Product Design, Journalism, Town Planning, Teacher, Psychologist, Pharmacist and so much more. The aim of the videos was to show the pupils that there is a career that everyone can aspire and work towards.
There was also the opportunity to take part in quizzes, activity sheets and the chance to talk about what our students thought they’d like to do as a career. The sessions created some great discussions within the form groups and gave the pupils some food-for-thought when it came to what career path they’d like to follow.
As a school we are passionate about ensuring our pupils are equipped with the knowledge needed when it come to career path decision making. It’s been great to dedicate this week to Careers, however we are proud to have a year-round career focused curriculum. This includes regular sessions from external speakers within different industries, the chance to attend our careers fair and meet potential employers, our work experience scheme, and the chance to take part in mock interviews.
Mrs Ball Subject Leader CEIAG said ’My aim is to ensure that Careers is fully embedded across the curriculum and to create opportunities for students to develop life skills'.
If you would like to keep up to date with everything ‘Careers’ at John Taylor, please follow our new twitter page @careersjths which will be an on-going feed full of advice, hints & tips for career opportunities.
#NCW2024
All videos & activities can be found here:
Jobs that use... - Careers - BBC Bitesize.
Careers in... - Careers - BBC Bitesize
Organisations 2023 - Green Careers Week
Quiz - Can you guess the job? - BBC Bitesize
Survey reveal: What's the new number one in top 10 jobs teens want? - BBC Bitesize
Penguin Random House UK - YouTube
Year 11 Borneo students would like to invite Year 7 students to ‘get their funk on’ at their Borneo fundraising disco on Wednesday 13th March. The team has worked hard to organise this exciting night for year 7 students so it will brilliant to see as many students there as possible.
The disco will take place in the school hall from 6pm -7.30pm. There will be a tuck shop and drinks available to buy on the night.
Tickets are £2.50 and can be purchased on Parent Pay. If you have any questions then please contact Miss Barker on [email protected]
Thank you to our Year 11 students for making the below poster with more information on.
For Parents - What is Palworld?
Palworld is a new game similar to Pokemon and Digimon with a PEGI rating of 12 for fantasy-character-style violence. Given its similarity to Pokemon there's every likelihood that younger children will be playing this game and so Internet Matters have compiled some advice and guidance for parents about the game: what it is, how it works, safety settings etc.
You can find the article HERE.
We are regularly updating the Safeguarding section of our school website to help parents/carers access important information about services available in the local area, as well as fully understanding our approach to Safeguarding in school.
This half term we have worked on the Filtering and Monitoring section on the Safeguarding page. We advise parents to read this to understand how we keep students safe in school by using filters (restricting access to harmful material) and then monitoring the use of IT devices across the site. Please note that all school owned devices have the monitoring software installed and therefore school owned devices are also monitored when used away from the school site.
This section also includes further information on how parents can set up monitoring on some mobile devices. We strongly advise parents to work with their home internet provider to ensure that suitable filtering is in place on home networks.
There are some useful links below from some of the main internet providers:
BT
BT Parental Controls - Keep Your Family Safe Online | BT Help
EE
Using Parental Controls on EE | Broadband Help | EE
Virgin
Parental Controls and Web Safety for Children | Virgin Media
Sky
You may have seen reports in the media around fines for parents choosing to take their children on term time holidays. This is actually linked to any unauthorised request for leave of absence. We felt it may be useful to clarify both this as well as the position of all schools in John Taylor MAT.
At John Taylor MAT, all schools are required to follow a common Pupil Attendance and Punctuality Policy in order to ensure fairness and consistency. With regards to legal intervention, all schools are expected to follow current local authority ‘Penalty Notice Codes of Conduct’ and thresholds for issuing penalty notice fines. For term time holidays, the Staffordshire County Council threshold for these fines is from 1 day or more. The full policy can be found in the policies and procedures section of the school website.
A new ‘national framework for penalty notices’ will be introduced from 19th August 2024 as detailed in the recent update to the DfE’s ‘Working together to improve attendance’ guidance. This has been reported in the media but will not become active until next academic year, 2024-25.