Headteacher's Newsletter

what's happening at Chesham Grammar

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Posted on: March 13th 2020

Head's Blog

Dear Parent,

What a week! As you can imagine, I have spent a good deal of time this week discussing coronavirus with colleagues within and outside the school. As a senior team, we have worked on our contingency plan which has been sent home today. It was also very useful to talk to the other Bucks grammar school Heads during the week at our half-termly meeting and for us all to share ideas on how to approach this unprecedented situation. The information in the document sent to parents today will also be shared with students but it would be helpful if you could get your child to check that they can login to their school Office 365 account from home as well as Canvas so that, should we have to close, we know students are set up and ready to access work their teachers will set. I am really disappointed for the students who were going to Poland or Iceland at Easter that we have had to cancel these visits. This is the right decision of course but I know they have been looking forward to this for months and that some of them were getting very excited as their visit got closer. We will follow the government's advice and all overseas visits will be cancelled until we are advised otherwise. Of course we do not yet know when the advice will change but we will be monitoring the situation regularly and will keep parents updated. We will also need to consider the domestic visits scheduled for next term and again, will be in touch with parents when we have been through these.

It was good to see Year 8 parents at our Progress Evening last night and I hope you found this useful. Our Year 7 Progress Evening is scheduled for Thursday 26th March and I do hope that this will be able to go ahead.

Happy 12th birthday to Isaac, Willow, Ellie, Samuel, Evie, Emilia, Kari and Robyn in Year 7 with whom I met for birthday tea this morning. 

In other news, well done to Franklin House who organised our charity week which culminated in a mufti day today. We have had penalty shoot outs, cake sales and a Frankin v other Houses staff netball match, all as part of our fund-raising for Sport Relief and The Julius Little Foundation. The House Captains in Franklin have worked very hard to prepare and run the events and I would like to congratulate them on a successful week. Many thanks to those of you who supported Isabella in Year 13 who took part in an Endurance80 event last weekend, walking 80km in just over 18 hours. Isabella aimed to raise £300 for the Julius Little Foundation but has smashed this target. £820 is now the total on her JustGiving page! I am very proud of Isabella; well done. 

I met with Isabella this week to congratulate her. I also met with Danyal in Year 11 who received an award from the Mayor of Chesham recently for all the hard work he does in the local community. Well done Danyal. Darcy, Gemma, Aimee and Clemmie in Year 10 as well as Jack and Delilah in Year 8 are members of the cast of Berkhamsted Youth Theatre's production of 'Wendy and Peter Pan' taking place at the Court Theatre in Tring next month. I enjoyed hearing about this and about the Mock Magistrates Trial which some of our Year 8 and 9s took part in last Saturday at Wycombe Magistrates Court. This is an excellent event in which the students take part in a mock trial, as the name suggests, taking on the various roles involved. They all said that they felt nervous at the start but thoroughly enjoyed the experience and learned a good deal from it. Well done to those in Year 9: Jessica, Louis-Ray, James and Felix and to the Year 8s involved: Tejas, Olivia, Ria, Henry, Jack, Mia, Lily, Bethan and Elliot. Finally, it was a pleasure to present Fiona and Finlay in Year 7 with their award for accumulating more than 200 House points, the first students in the school to reach this milestone so far this year. Well done!

Yesterday, Year 9 students took part in a workshop run by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. This was a practical session and they had to work together to design and build a community centre, using a good deal of information and drawing on the expertise of industry experts who were with us for the morning. They really enjoyed this and it was a useful insight into the range of careers in this field, some of which the students had never heard of. Thank you to the staff who organised this. Thank you too to the Sixth Form team who took Year 12s to the UCAS Convention yesterday which was a good opportunity for students to get a feel for the vast range of courses they can go on to study at university and to talk to representatives from those institutions. 

Finally, a huge thank you to parents who have supported our Aviva crowdfunding project, raising money for recycling at CGS. £3,607 has already been pledged, almost three quarters of the £5,000 target. It would be fantastic for the students to be able to reach their target and to have the money and the impetus to really get to grips with this issue at CGS so please do support them if you can. You can find the details at https://www.avivacommunityfund.co.uk/chesham-get-recycling

Thank you.

With best wishes for a relaxing weekend,

Annmarie McNaney
Headteacher

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