Dear Families,
As we reach the end of Week 9, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for your support in what has been another hugely successful week at Preston.
This week, 862 students have been rewarded for demonstrating our GREAT attributes, with 3,894 achievement points awarded. A huge well done to Mollie N in 9LST, who received 17 of these, as well as Ellie C in 9LST, Joe T in 08CSM, Dorothy F in 09SSI, Dom B in 08MPR, and Jack S in 09LST who all have over 13 points awarded this week.
Behaviour points continue to drop, with fewer points awarded every single week this year compared to the equivalent week in 2024 and 2023. This week, the total number of points recorded has reduced by 32.7% when compared to this school week last year, and a brilliant 57.6% compared to this week in 2023. I am delighted that this reduction has occurred while maintaining our high expectations; we are clear with our expectations for Preston School students, and they are rising to them.
An example of this is seen in our new late initiative. We were clear with students in September that too often last year, students were choosing to arrive late at their lessons. To combat this, like many other local schools, a late bell now rings five minutes into lessons which marks the point at which students are significantly late, with them staying until 4pm to make up this time. Students at Preston have been on time for 99.96% of lessons this year, once again showing the brilliant cohort that we are lucky to have.
Attendance continues to be a priority for schools. Nationally, attendance has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels and it is increasingly clear that this is impacting the life chances of our young people. In my assemblies with students this week, I shared with students headlines from the latest Government research into the impact of attendance. This notes that each day of absence for a student at secondary school results in a £750 loss in lifetime earnings. The research went on to look in detail at 637,790 students who took their GCSEs in the academic year 2006/2007. The 33,629 students in that year group with attendance of 99% or above, went on to gain employment earning an average of approximately £33,000 a year. The 18,303 students with an attendance of 89%-90% went on to gain employment earning an average of approximately £25,000 a year. Those who missed between 50% and 51% of school, earned approximately £12,000 a year on average.
I am absolutely clear that students are likely to fall ill during their time with us and on many of those occasions, staying at home in bed for a day or two is absolutely the best thing for them. That said, too often nationally students are staying home for reasons that are not genuine, and I would encourage all families to support the national drive to continue to improve school attendance. That said, I am delighted that our attendance, while ultimately still below where I would like it to be, is now significantly above the national average. Our attendance is 94.1%, against a national average of 92.8%.
We have this week had a number of issues with students joining anonymous ‘group chats’ via WhatsApp, Instagram and SnapChat. These groups, setup by anonymous users from outside of the local area, often involve well over 100 young people. In the instances raised this week, these have included students from other schools sharing explicit images of themselves, alongside considerable unpleasant language, including racism and homophobia. These sorts of group chats are exceptionally dangerous. While the users added claim to all be children, we know from feedback from the police that this is often not the case, with similar groups used in the past by adults to groom young people online.
I would encourage all families to have an open dialogue with their children around the dangers of these sorts of mass group chats, along with communicating with strangers online. I would also strongly encourage a home dynamic whereby the phones of students, particularly those under the age of 16, are looked at by parents from time to time. We will of course continue to follow this up at school, as part of our assemblies, PSHE and Computing curriculum areas.
Next week is an important week at Preston, as we undertake our first whole-school assembly of the year on Tuesday, for remembrance. This special event reminds me again of the brilliant behaviour we see at Preston, as 1,000 students each year respectfully mark the occasion together in our sports hall. In addition, our Head Boy and Head Girl will be joining me to lay a wreath at our local war memorial on Tuesday morning. On Friday, we will have our second non-uniform day of the year, this time raising money for Children in Need. It was great to see £662 raised before half term, which will be split between our four house charities. Next week also marks the start of the Year 11 mock examinations. We wish all of Year 11 luck in these.
This term brings another range of exciting opportunities for our students. We have 49 clubs for the term listed on our website and already this week, 292 different students have attended after-school sessions. The term sees orchestra performances for Year 7 students continue next week, Year 10 DT students visit Numatic’s factory in Chard, while Year 11 students will visit Strode College. Today, students in Year 10 visited Wookey Hole. The term will finish on Friday 19thDecember with our famous Christmas lunch and Christmas jumper day. We also have some exciting four-legged visitors booked for students in our zero and one club, so please do encourage students not to miss what promises to be a really exciting final day of term.
Have a lovely weekend.
Thank you,
Matt Doble