Dear UCC Families,

I had the pleasure of sitting in on a meeting, alongside Miss Ives, between three of our students, Ed Lever, Hope Rowlett, Anna Tring, and John Herbert from Rutland County Council, about establishing a Youth Sustainability Forum that would support schools in Rutland de-carbonising. Ed, Hope and Anna were amazing, and their work (particularly Ed's persistent lobbying of local MPs and councillors) is ensuring young people at UCC are at the heart of sustainable change in the county. They have big plans which they are going away to work on with our student Eco-group and I will update you in due course on their progress. 

I have spent time this week providing tours around the school for a number of different people and groups. As we have visited lessons we have observed calm and focussed students, and all the visitors have remarked about how welcoming and orderly the school is. They have also been extremely impressed with how the facilities and the learning environment have been enhanced during the past 2 years. We have ambitious plans for further facility development at UCC, some of which are dependent on us securing significant bids from central government. Specifically, we are seeking to cease our dependency on temporary mobile blocks (of which we have 2, both of which are dated) and create a solution that will secure high quality learning facilities for generations to come. Our main bid will centre on creating a new Modern Foreign Languages teaching block, which will then in turn enable us to further enhance our music and science classrooms. These plans span a five-year period and I will provide specific details on these when we have learnt about the success of our application, which is likely to be communicated to us in March.

In our most recent evaluation exercise with the Leicestershire and Rutland Health Protection Team, UCC was graded as 'Stage 0' of their Outbreak Management plan, which means the levels of Covid within the student and staff population here have dropped since we reintroduced our emphasis on wearing face coverings. However, during this week we have seen the number of cases increase again and we will be liaising with the local team again with regard to this increase. Our staff are wearing face coverings consistently when moving around the school and when they cannot stay 2m away from colleagues or students. Students have a personal choice as to whether they wish to wear them or not, which remains the same arrangement as before half-term. On Monday and Thursday this week we hosted Covid vaccinations for students, it all ran very smoothly despite the government changing the guidance halfway through the week. Students who have not yet received their vaccinations will be able to organise them through a number of local providers.

I hope you have a great weekend,
Mr Solly