Twitter and Facebook?

Just really quickly to begin........Saturday was wonderful! Thank you so much to all the parents, grandparents, children, staff and friends from the community who came along to school on Saturday to support our first Environment Improvement day of the year. After four hours of work and 100 burgers and sausages later, plus another full skip the improvements are hopefully clear to see and enjoy! We will certainly be holding another such event early in January!

And so to the promised main point of this blog and it is a subject on which I would really value your thoughts. At St Jude's we work really hard to achieve the best possible communication with parents and the wider school community. Internally this is a challenge, with over 50 staff, a number of whom work part time, this is far from easy and it remains the one thing we still struggle a bit with. To counteract this some schools have set up their own staff "Facebook" groups or "Twitter" accounts and this has become their main form of communication. Now this is not something I can ever see us doing at St Jude's, but it has come up many times recently as a question from parents and colleagues who feel the school as a whole should have a Facebook page or Twitter account. I really would be very keen to hear your views, as parents, on this. My perspective as head is that we already do a great deal to communicate widely and increasingly effectively with yourselves as parents and I am uncertain as to what either of these forms of communication would bring to us. Our website is good and, providing it doesn't crash, remains a reliable method of communication. Parentmail is, I think, effective when we need to use it, provided we have the correct contact information for the recipients. We aim to make the newsletter comprehensive and informative and the information that comes from classes is now more consistent. In addition to this we are developing our school intranet for launch after Christmas and the "Meet the Headteacher / School Improvement Team" sessions give you regular opportunity to ask those questions which have been nagging away! As well as all of these methods, Rachael Osborne and I try to accommodate any request for short notice meetings and of course there is the 24 hour email access. So the purpose of this blog today is to actively seek your views on the suggestion that we should set up a whole school "St Jude's CE Primary School" Facebook page or Twitter Account. The question then is, should we do this and if so why should we? Thank you for your help with this!

Another year begins!

I do sincerely hope you all had a wonderful summer break with the children and that the first few days of the new term have been positive for both them and yourselves. For me, personally, it feels almost impossible to consider the fact that September 2013 represents 33 years in this amazing profession and therefore 33 new year starts. I can honestly say I have enjoyed each and every one of the years I have worked in education and yet each one will have been filled with centrally imposed changes which at the time we thought we would struggle to absorb. This year is no different!
We have a brand new Curriculum which we need to begin to get used to ready for the official first teaching in September 2014. You may be aware, through the national news, of the new 'performance related pay' regulations which we now have to make our way through during the coming months as well as yet another new Ofsted framework to become familiar with. These developments will give you an idea of a few of the things which will captivate our time and attention during the coming few months, all the while keeping clear our intention of creating an outstanding place of education and development in which we want each child to flourish.
In addition to these projects, this year will see the start and almost completion of the long awaited building project to improve the Foundation Stage classrooms and the Admin Areas as well as create a new, larger staffroom for all who work at St Jude's. It is undoubtedly going to be a busy year and we want you all to be as involved as you can be. This is why we thought it would be a really good idea to invite you and your children into school on Saturday 21st September, where we will share on a project together for the morning and picnic together at the conclusion of the planned activity.
The idea came about after the Year 3 Garden day last term and we thought it would be a great idea to get together and work on something very special for the school. The plan is that school will be open from 9.30am to 2pm, and together we will spend some time, clearing areas of the school grounds and making them as beautiful as they have the potential to be. Then at the conclusion of the morning we will offer a barbecue lunch or you could bring a picnic and we could share some time together, getting to know each other and developing our sense of community. I really do hope you will be able to join us in a couple of weeks time for this special event.
I am certain we can make this year a very special one for our children and our school community as a whole and I am looking forward to working with you to enable this to become a reality!