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Parent Bulletin 30/04/2021

Please see the latest bulletin from Mr Solly below...

Dear Parents and Carers,

I hope you have all had a good week. A particular highlight at UCC for me was seeing the volume of Kindness Awards that Mrs Stuart-Jones gave out to our members of staff. For me, I believe kindness to be the most important of our school values and I think it is great that colleagues are able to nominate people who they feel deserve a small recognition for the kindness they have shown to others. This is an example of us truly living and breathing our values. I will be encouraging our students to nominate their peers or members of staff, who they have seen demonstrating kindness throughout the rest of this term. On the theme of kindness, I listened to a great podcast recently, on which Dr David Hamilton spoke about how contagious kindness is and how the R number for it is 5. it is a fascinating episode of 'Don't Tell Me The Score', which you might be interested in listening to: https://www.simonmundie.com/blog/dr-david-hamilton-the-power-of-kindness 

LFD Home Tests
I am delighted with the high levels of students completing the LFD tests on a weekly basis. The statistics from last week are below; these figures show a large proportion of our student population are taking this very seriously and diligently taking the tests twice each week. The figure for Year 11 does seem alarming at first glance, but considering that they were not provided with test kits last week (this was because there was a delay in them being posted to schools) I think it is impressive that 80% of students still completed their tests via their own resourcefulness. I know this has only been possible because parents will have been encouraging and reminding their children to complete the tests, so I would like to pass on my gratitude to you all for your support. 

Autism and our Enhanced Resource Provision
You will be aware that from September 2020, we opened a small Enhanced Resource Provision for young people with communication and interaction needs. This means that in Year 7 each year, 2 additional students will be allocated a place at UCC, on top of the 180 who apply to the school and are awarded places. These young people access the curriculum as much as possible, based on their individual needs, with a specialist team of staff who support them in a variety of ways. As part of raising everyone's awareness of how young people with autism experience the world, we have been sharing resources with students and staff and this video was shown to all students on Monday this week for their 'virtual assembly' - it is well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ybPgmjTRvMo&feature=youtu.be


Rebuilding update
I managed to get into the building site this week and see first hand the progress that has been made by our contractors. The work has been largely a 'stripping out' process thus far, but the size and shape of the spaces is becoming apparent. The photo below is the space previously known as the fitness suite, English 4 and English 5. We have knocked through all of these spaces to create a new Fitness Suite that will be over 130mwhich is very exciting indeed! The English classrooms have already been relocated elsewhere in the school, one of which is the room currently being used by Mrs Smithson, which is a large, bright, and very pleasant learning space. I will issue more details of the rebuilding project in the bulletin next week, so you are able to see the plans for the first and second floors that are being restored.

I hope you are all able to enjoy the bank holiday weekend with family and friends.

Take care and stay safe,
Mr Solly