Dear UCC Families

Maths review
It has been another great week at UCC. I am thoroughly enjoyed my visits to lessons, and in particular it was great to observe our students working very diligently in maths classes. This week we have completed our Department Self Review process for maths and this involves a number of activities to support our constant drive for learning and improvement across the school. We have detailed curriculum conversations about curriculum content, sequencing and the assessment of student progress. We collect the views of students and staff, and we analyse the progress students are making over time. We have observed many lessons to see teaching and learning in action; I jointly observed Year 9 with Mr Jones earlier this week, and we were both very impressed with what we saw. We also involve external colleagues to provide additional scrutiny and this week it was a pleasure to welcome Mr Lane, who is Senior Deputy Headteacher at Lutterworth College, to participate in lesson observations. All of this is to help support our internal evaluations and identify ways in which we can further improve our provision for students.

Very sad news
This week we received some very sad news that a former UCC student, Desmond Weich, died last weekend. Desmond left UCC in 2017 and people tell me he was quite the character. I know many people will remember him fondly. It is always a tragedy when someone so young passes away and our thoughts go out to Desmond's family and friends. I hope over the coming weeks the school community will be able to contribute positively towards celebrating Desmond's life. In the meantime, Desmond's sister, Zelna, has set up a gofundme page to raise money for CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably). The link is here if you would like to contribute: https://www.gofundme.com/f/in-desmonds-memory 

Covid
On the Covid front, we have continued to maintain face to face teaching for all year groups, but this has been a huge challenge. Our staff absence levels have remained high due to Covid and this has meant a big collective effort from colleagues across the school to ensure we have a teacher in front of every class. We are very grateful for the continued home testing that families are conducting; students have been issued with enough tests to carry out twice weekly testing until March 23rd. However, circumstances may mean that more frequent testing is being carried out. We do have spare kits at school, so please ask your child to pop to Student Services if you need a new kit. We will be issuing new test kits to all students during the first week back after half-term (WB: 21/02/22).

As we have experienced an increase in positive cases following the national announcement that face masks are no longer required, we have been in liaison with Public Health England. I am still awaiting their guidance at the time of writing and will provide an update when this is received. 

Year 9 Options
After the half-term break, Year 9 students will begin the process of choosing their options for Key Stage 4. More information about this will be sent home in the next few weeks. However, we will be holding our Options Evening in school on Thursday 24th February from 5:30 to 7:30pm. This will be your opportunity to discuss options with Heads of Subject, so please save this date.

Please take the time to read through the rest of the newsletter.

Have a great weekend.

Take care,
Mr Solly