Week 11

Dear Parent,

I attended Coffee Mornings at Fairlawn and Kilmorie last week and continued to learn about the schools.  The fascinating thing, of course, is that this process of learning about the schools never stops, nor should it stop.  Schools are by their nature dynamic places.  Things inevitably change over time.  The task of school leadership is to remain in tune with the community, respond to shifting landscapes, anticipate the future… and try to make coherent sense of it all in terms of policy and practice.

 

The Heads of School and I attended the Lewisham Headteacher’s Conference this week.  The highlights were talks by Prof David Hopkins and David Cameron (not that David Cameron) about research-informed practice and Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence.  These talks provoked thoughts for us all about further developments and enhancement for all our schools.

I had a conversation with Lewisham Heads about the future of our partnership Teaching School.  The Teaching School is a ‘Virtual School’ that aims to develop teachers and leaders in schools and act as an Action Research hub.  The Teaching School has a great deal to offer the community of Lewisham schools and vice versa.  The Teaching School is now actively recruiting Schools Direct teacher trainees to train with us in 2013-14.  The idea here is that the schools have far more input into the development of trainee teachers than was previously the case.  This enables us to bring a constant stream of new and exceptional teachers into our schools year-on-year. 

Please share with friends, family and neighbours the fact that we are actively seeking graduates with the drive, energy and passion to be outstanding teachers to join our Schools Direct training programme for 2013-14.

These are exciting times for all of our schools.  I look forward to keeping you informed of developments, as they happen.

Have a great weekend,

Mark Wilson

Week 10

Dear Parent/ Carer,

We are beginning our preparations for Christmas performances at Fairlawn, have had a School Review at Haseltine and are deep into our learning at Kilmorie this week.  I have been pleased to meet more parents on the playground and during the Coffee Morning at Fairlawn and on the playground at Kilmorie.  I have learned more about the unique eco-system of the area... specifically the South London Parakeets and the South London Stag Beetle Belt.... fascinating stuff!

I will be attending the Monday Coffee Mornings at Fairlawn for the next few weeks and have a Q&A Meet and Greet Evening at Fairlawn on Thursday 29th November, 8.00pm-9.30pm.  At Kilmorie, our Q&A Meet and Greet Evening is on Wednesday 28th November, 7.00pm-8.30pm.  I hope to see many of you there.  There will be further opportunities throughout the year to meet informally with myself and the school leadership teams at each of the schools throughout the year... dates to be published soon.

Our schools collaboration continues to grow.  Last week, Maths Leaders from the three schools came together to look at how their subject operates across the three schools.  Our aim is to take the best aspects from each and build that into the best in all aspects for all.  Similarly, our Pupil Voice leaders met.  We have exciting ideas in mind for how a strong voice from our children can help us to shape and develop our schools and our partnership.  Further and deepened collaborations are both planned and are in process.  I am sure that you will begin to see the fruits of the great work that is happening between colleagues from the three schools in the weeks and months to come.

 Some super Artworks and Homeworks from Kilmorie to share and celebrate this week....

Well done to our all of our Homeworkers and artists.

Have a lovely week,
Mark Wilson
Executive Headteacher

Kilmorie webstats

40,662 visitors to the website in the past year

116,249 total page views
7,779 views of the kids zone, which links to activities and games
4,187 views of the class pages

1,556 in October
1,022 visits so far in November


7,638 ( 56%) of visits are from UK
4,330 (32%) USA
47 visits to the website from Australia
43 visits from china
20 visits from Spain
14 visits from Japan



This is great!
Thanks to everyone for visiting, and do tell us what we could be doing better, how we could be making navigation easier, etc.

Week 9

Dear Parent/ Carer,

The first week back after the first Half Term always puts me in the mind that Christmas concerts, Carols Around The Tree and more will be upon us very soon.  I am looking forward to celebrating Christmas with our children and with you all.

First, the business of learning.  We have hit the ground running again after the break.  I have asked all staff to set themselves small achievable goals for every Half Term.  Goals for how they will help our children to progress; to acquire a new skill, to secure new learning, to breakthrough a barrier from the first Half Term.  The business of learning is a joint enterprise, and I would encourage you to build that rich dialogue with your child's teacher in support of their learning.  Ask those questions that you don't know the answer to, give us feedback on your child's learning.

Our unique partnership of schools has been on my mind this week.  One of the many attractions for me in this post was the opportunities that the partnership offers to all of our children and each of our communities.  Our teachers this week began a collaboration on developing Pupil Voice in our schools, all of our Maths leaders met together to plot how we will together improve our provision for Maths.  I am meeting with teams next week to look at building a World Class curriculum that uses London as its inspiration... together.  In the background, teams are collaborating on ICT, assessment and quality of teaching.  I am sure that as the year progresses many and much more tangible examples of our partnership will be in evidence.  We are, for instance, planning joint sports and Arts activities.

I am also very keen to develop further - from what is already a very well established, very rich and very diverse range of community-based activity in our schools - our engagement with our communities.  Again, a huge attraction for me was the richness and the depth of talent and creativity that exists within our school communities.  I am eager to tap into that in any way that we can, for the benefit of our children.  The more experiences that we can give them, the greater the breadth of opportunities they have, the more experts and inspirational role models that they meet... the better.  The schools themselves don't always have all of the answers and sometimes we can overlook the blindingly obvious... Please, let us know what skills and talents you have, if we don't know already, and if you are able to make them available to support children's learning and experience at our schools.

Have a great weekend,
Mark Wilson

Fairlawn web stats

Fairlawn web stats from 23 Sept to 23 Oct:

3,511 visitors to the Fairlawn website.
2,057 unique visitors (first visit)
11,688 pages viewed
An average page visit of 3.32 pages.
Average time spent on the website is 3mins 37 seconds
53% of users returned back to the site during the month

Of the 3,511 visitors, 630 were Mobile device users.  iPad users were top (314 visitors), followed by iPhone (204 visitors)

UK is top for visitors.
Outside of the London... Croydon (55 visits), Wembley (42), Birmingham (22) and Slough and Hull (19).
We had some 224 visitors from the US and 11 visitors each from France, Australia and South Africa.

The most popular blog during the month has been 'tell-the-story-of-the-little-red-hen/' with 121 visitors, followed by the Fairlawn Fun run (85)


Thanks for visiting our website and blogs.