Dear Parents and Carers,

Thank you, once again, for your responses and comments to our annual parental questionnaire. Each year we collate the results together and carefully consider these as a staff team.

The results continue to be extremely positive; this year these were further enhanced by the results and comments from the additional questionnaire relating to the School Vision of creating successful learners, confident individuals and respectful citizens as well as through a children’s questionnaire which asked a variety of questions linked to those asked of the adults.

The key statements are that 100% of you feel your children are happy and safe and 99% of you state that you would recommend Archibald to another parent. Thank you!

Your collective comments about what we do well are summarised below.

Below are the collated numeric responses to share with you. These are followed by a summary of comments and our next steps.

Results from the previous year can be accessed via the website https://www.archibaldfirstschool.org.uk/parents-information/parents-feedback/

Some of your comments related to how we can continue to support the children become Responsible Citizens: Currently each class undertakes a PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) lesson a week. Together with our themes of Health and Well Being, Relationships and Living in the Wider World, we also deliver the No Outsiders work which promotes the Equalities Act. Each year group takes part in weekly Religious Education lessons learning about different religions such as Christianity, Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism.

Green Team is strongly focused with an Eco Drive which is to continue to be shared throughout the school community.  Recently we have introduced the Big Battery Hunt and reduced our whole school waste by asking for children to use reusable water bottles as opposed to cups. We will continue to look for new initiatives.

With our new bike and scooter storage to be installed in July, we hope that this will further encourage our families to ride and stride to school as opposed to driving to promote an active start to the school day in conjunction with reducing air pollution around school.

Assemblies are based on themes such as respect, trust, resilience, perseverance, determination, tolerance, kindness, friendship, acceptance and understanding. We also celebrate key religious festivals in assemblies throughout the year.

Next Steps

• Future plans relate to Year 3 undertaking the Young Leaders Award (Spring 2020) in preparation for their role in school as monitors and playground leaders.
• An updated PSHE plan is busy being devised and this will also incorporate plans for learning about the environment as well as being a responsible citizen.

At Archibald we strive to promote healthy lifestyles inclusive of bodies and minds.
In terms of physical activity; Nursery and Reception classes take part in a weekly PE session in addition to their daily outside time. Years 1, 2, and 4 have two hours of PE a week whilst Year 3 have either an hour of PE and an hour of swimming or 2 hours of PE.

There are opportunities for physical activity clubs such as football, tag rugby, dance, gymnastics, multi-skills and taekwondo. As a school we also take part in many additional sporting opportunities such as the School Games 500, Your School Games with Newcastle PE Sports Service and ‘Gosforth Gets Going’ with the Trust Schools. Classes have also visited Walker Dome for PE and Play events as well as Benfield for similar activities. Year groups have worked with NUFC for football, invasion games and rugby, and with the Cricket Club during 2018-19.

Families are actively encouraged to ride or stride to school where possible.

In terms of healthy eating choices; we cover this through some of our different topics talking to children about those food items which we should eat often and those which should be kept as a treat and limited. Everything in moderation is our message!

Nursery to Year 2 are provided with a piece of fruit every day whilst Key Stage 2 are able to bring in a piece of fruit from home to eat at morning break time. Milk is provide to children until the date of their 5^th birthday Any family can then purchase milk for their child from www.coolmilk.co.uk as soon as they turn 5.

Next Steps

• With our playground revamp happening over the summer we will be hoping to keep children even more active in their play and lunch times.
• We are to explore moving our salad bar in the dinner hall to encourage even more children to access this on a daily basis whilst School Council will be promoting healthy eating including balanced packed lunches in 2019-20.

Our array of clubs can be found on the Clubs page https://www.archibaldfirstschool.org.uk/school-clubs/ on the school website.  In fact, there are so many different clubs running in school each morning, lunchtime and after school that we are running out of space to host them all!

These are the clubs which have been held in 2018-19 to date.

• Violin
• Guitar
• Brass
• Let’s Get Cooking
• Tag Rugby
• Gosforth Voices
• STEM
• Yoga Bugs
• Mindfulness
• Multi-skills
• Choir
• Gosforth Band
• Dance
• School Council
• Green Team
• Taekwondo
• Running
• Little Rescuers
• Art
• Tennis
• Singing
• Football
• Gymnastics

Next Steps

• We have asked the children which clubs they would like to take part in.
• If any parents would be interested in hosting a club, please contact the school.
• If you have any recommendations for club providers, please contact the school.

We strive to keep you up to date with all events in school, and this was recognised in many of your positive comments regarding home/school communication. A single school calendar is published on the website, https://www.archibaldfirstschool.org.uk/parents-information/diary/ , with dates being added continuously. Where dates are changed due to the busy nature of a school, we hopefully indicate this on the website as we do appreciate that many parents look ahead. Dates are also published on the half termly newsletters and key dates are within the curriculum booklets.

Emails are sent to the named contact on Parent Pay which means only the selected parent (and the chosen email address) will get the emails. Text messages are sent to the primary contact. A hard copy of all information is provided for those families for who we do not have e-mail contact details.

If you wish to change who receives the emails, please update your Parent Pay Account. For a change of text message recipient, please contact the school office. If any dates or letters are missing from the website, please let us know and we will add these as soon as possible. A paper copy is always kept at the office for reference.

Next Steps

• As a school we are looking into electronic consent forms via Parent Pay which will further reduce our paper usage as a school. This may be trialled in the autumn term.

Homework continues to be a topic of conversation; however, 85% of you still agree or strongly agree that we do get it right. This is further supported with an average of 95% of children from Reception to Year 4 enjoying the half termly topic project/You and Me Task, with 85% really enjoying them. The open aspect of these tasks works well for children who like to share their knowledge linked to a particular topic that we have not looked at in school and enables families to explore a topic further or to look at it from a different angle. It also enables children to have the opportunity to present their work in their own creative way.

85% of Years 3 and 4 also say that the homework is supportive. The weekly homework always supports the learning that has taken place in class. Teachers will not set something ‘new’ for the children to complete at home.

Giving homework on a Friday to be returned on the Tuesday gives our staff time to look through the homework and address any misconceptions in the lessons with the children before having to set new homework for the following Friday. Some parents have talked about how they photograph or note down the weekly spellings prior to returning the homework book. If this is an issue, then please speak to the class teacher who can provide you with another copy. Thank you for your understanding with this.

Next Steps:

• We will update the Support Topics page with helpful hints and tips to support your children at home https://www.archibaldfirstschool.org.uk/parents-information/support-topics/ We will let you know when this is completed.

Your feedback including positive comments and suggestions for consideration are valued and wherever feasible acted upon. We look forward to continuing to work with you in partnership to make Archibald the special school that it is.

The Archibald Team