Dear Parents and Carers
Our Mission at St Mary’s Cathoilic College is to develop individual excellence through embracing opportunities and building communities with Gospel values at the heart of everything that we do. To enable students to embrace opportunities we must provide them with outstanding learning experiences both inside and outside of the classroom. To do this we need to fully utilise the time that we have in school, it is important that the College day maximises the time that the students have with us. At the moment, there are a number of issues that currently hinder this aim, these are;
- Staff and Students consistently tell us that they wish to increase the length of lunch time and reduce the time spent in form time;
- Staff are unable to run a full suite clubs and societies at lunch time;
- Students who need to catch a bus afterschool can not stay for after school clubs, this impacts the equity of access to enrichment opportunities;
- Our school day is very complex. There is no equity in lesson time due to longer lessons in the morning and shorter lessons in the afternoon and there are split lunches.
- Assemblies run at the same time as lunch time, leading to being difficult for children to concentrate on key messages;
- Students who wish to speak to teachers at lunch time are often unable to do so because they are on different lunch times. It is difficult for us to offer the amount of support that we would like to with the current arrangement;
- Welfare issues cannot be addressed at the start of the day due to the form tutor only seeing children in the afternoon:
Further to this, the Department for Education has indicated that children nationally should now be in school for a minimum of 32.5 hours each week. As our school day does not meet the new DfE requirement it presents us with an opportunity to address some of the issues listed above.
Solutions
- Increase the school day for children by 15 minutes;
- Introduce form time reading each morning for 15 minutes;
- Remove split lunches for different year groups and move to a single lunch time for all; students – where they will have a designated time in the canteen;
- Introduce 1 form time session for all children;
- Introduce 5 x 55minutes lessons across the day;
The proposed school day will look like this from September 2022
| Time | Activity |
| 08:00-08:35 | Free Breakfast |
| 08:35-08:50 | Form time reading |
| 08:50-09:45 | Period 1 |
| 09:45-10:40 | Period 2 |
| 10:40-11:00 | Break |
| 11:00-11:55 | Period 3 |
| 11:55 -12:50 | Period 4 |
| 12:50-13:35 | Lunch/Clubs and Societies |
| 13:35-13:40 | Line up |
| 13:40-14:10 | Inspire P&A time |
| 14:10-15:05 | Period 5 |
We hope that this day provides increased opportunities for all of our staff and students to work together and succeed together.
If you would like to provide feedback on this model please do so here before 1pm on Tuesday 21st June 2021.
Regards
Mr K Maddocks
Headteacher
