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Welcome Back to the New Academic Year 2021/22

Welcome Back to the New Academic Year 2021/22
 
I would like to wish everyone a very warm welcome back to Birchwood Primary School. I hope you all had an enjoyable summer, managed to spend some time with friends and family and got to spend a few days away, even if it was only in the UK!
 
After 18 months of upheaval and having to work and learn under strict control measures, it has been so nice to finally be able to open school under more normal conditions. I know the last couple of school years have been a very testing and challenging time for everyone, but it really has been lovely to see so many of our children with smiles on their faces, happy to be able to mix and see each other again. It has also been really nice to meet our new children this week who will be starting in our two Reception classes.
 
During the summer holiday, we have had a few school improvements completed, looking to continue to improve our school environment for everyone. We now have a brand new school library ‘Willis’s World of Words’ named in recognition of Mrs Willis’s long service to our school. We are really looking forward to letting children use our library again and will be opening up our library after school from next week on a Monday and Friday. We have had a treatment room installed in our Upper school and we have also had our staffroom refurbished. Mr Jackson (Caretaker) has been very busy over the summer carrying out a variety of decoration work inside and outside our school, ensuring that it is a fantastic place for our children to learn.
 
Our teaching staff have been extremely busy preparing and setting up their classrooms and are really happy that they can have children working in groups again. They have also been planning and preparing lessons and activities to be able to assess children’s current levels, identifying potential gaps in learning, so that we can tailor future planning to meet the needs of all of our children.
 
Our children are returning to a school with a hybrid of practice. We will be reintroducing many of the systems, routines and approaches we had in place before Covid, but we will also be keeping some of the changes we introduced that we found to be beneficial and an improvement on previous standards.  I want to share my thanks to all our children and parents for continuing to work with us and support us with the changes we have made.
 
We are determined to make sure that we do all we can to ensure that our children make up for any lost time in school. We are currently busy putting together our plan for after school activities for this term. These will start the week beginning 20th September and we will send out more details when we have them. We will also be starting our maths and English morning booster sessions for children in Years 3, 4, 5 and 6 and again will be sharing more details regarding these next week. Trips and visitors into school have been mapped out across the school year and are being organised as I write. We are really looking forward to being able to take our children out each term to support their learning and our whole school curriculum offer.
 
Although we would have preferred to have had a week of sunshine during the school holidays, it has been nice for the children to return to school with the sun shining. We have definitely made the most of the school field and picnic areas this week and we are hoping for a few more nice days this half term. I am sure this will be another successful year for everyone at Birchwood and I want to thank our whole school community for the important role you all play in the continued success of our school.
 
Mr Coleman - Headteacher