Dear Parents, Guardians and Friends
Welcome back to another school year, and for our new readers, a very warm welcome to our Senior Leadership Team (SLT) blog ………
Our SLT blog comes out each Wednesday and is written by a different member of SLT each week to give you an update on what has been happening over the week in school.
We were delighted to welcome our new Year 7 and 12 students to our school last Thursday. Each year group had a special induction day led by their Heads of Year. The Year 7 students were also supported by the Soulscape Team last week, who did a terrific job greeting the students as they came into school, alongside the teaching staff, with a friendly smile and wave. They were also here at break and lunch to help ease our new students into Holt life! We would like to thank them for doing such a great job! Our Year 7s look really well settled already and it is great to see their happy, smiley faces. We look forward to seeing our Year 7 parents again tonight in the main hall at 6pm for an information evening.
We also welcomed a bumper Year 12 into our 6th form, with over 140 students choosing The Holt for their A levels!
On Friday, we then welcomed back the rest of the school. The buzz of the first week back is so lovely; it is great catching up with everyone and seeing the students so pleased to see each other…..and I will go as far saying being happy to be back!
Mrs Kennedy and I led a welcome back assembly on Thursday and Friday and then this week we are leading more assemblies- this time on the theme of grapple…….and by grapple, we don’t mean a wrestling hold as in the sport……..but we do mean struggle in the sense of perseverance and not giving up. We talk about how we all struggle with things in life, or in our learning and how we can work through it. In our learning, we can do this by breaking things down into small chunks, being organised, asking for help, and having a go at tough questions. Since we planned this theme before the summer, we both agreed that we seem to be hearing this word everywhere at the moment … maybe it’s the Olympics….but we are fans of grapple for sure!
The Year 12 students were welcomed back to school with an enrichment fair on Friday. It was lovely to see so many volunteers from local charities such as Oxfam here to offer opportunities for our 6th formers to get involved with volunteering outside of school, as well as volunteer to offer support in school. Many of our students have signed up as classroom attachment, where they come into lessons for the younger to help out, which is greatly appreciated by the teachers. They also signed up to help run clubs for the main school. We are keen to start our extensive enrichment programme as soon as possible. I am sure there will be an update in the blog next week!
Coming back in September, it always amazes me how much work gets done on the site over the holidays. Just as you think no more areas of the school can be reconfigured, the busy site team do it all again, and it looks amazing. This summer the upgrades to the café were completed
The Philosophy of Religion (PoR) room was upgraded
A new break out room for mentoring in the Learning Link was created
The PE office was gutted and updated……..they hadn’t yet moved back in when this picture was taken!
And as we told you about last term, progress on our new build has been speedy! The old 50s building was finally removed
And this is what we had planned
And here it is being shipped in……
And our proud site team, Ben Phillips, site manager and Tom McWilliam our operations and estates directly are here with Andy from the installation team…..
We are very excited for the grand opening. The new building will be home to the site team and the IT team. There will also be two much needed classrooms.
I would like to say thank you so much to Tom and Ben and their team for all the hard work over the summer. The site looks really great!
We are rightly proud of our school, Mrs Kennedy and I, and once again we were delighted with the performance of our GCSE and A level students this summer. An incredible 88.7% of Year 11 obtained at least 5 GCSEs including maths and English at grades 4 and above, with a whopping 51.7% of all GCSEs graded 7-9! Well done to them all. Our Year 13 students obtained 66% A*AB, with 35% A*A and a new Holt record of 12% A*! Fantastic!
Our Year 13 students certainly left us happy and ready for their next stage in life which for us was a delight to see.
Over their time here, we want our students to be kind, aim high and work hard and be proud to be a Holt student ……and they certainly were a great group. We wish them well.
Katie Pearce
Co-headteacher