Newsletters

Year 7 Rewards

Over the last two weeks another 38 Y7 students have joined the Bronze club with 100+ reward points. The students receive a certificate from Mr Skipp in recognition of their excellent effort and contribution they are making to the school. Remember points can be cashed in for prizes at anytime – I have seen footballs and Haribos amongst other things being delivered at tutor time – or they can be saved up for a bigger prize at the end of the year.

Well done Y7. Keep up the excellent work.

Mrs Addison, Miss Wood & Ms Stewart

Reece B                Ethan M               Lewis G

Sydney T              Josh A                   Anton P

Erin C                   Ella W                   Valentina S

Cameron N          Danielle T           Layla P

Sasha R                Annabelle K         Luke H

David E                Daniel M              Nicole E

Kaci L                   Zak H                   Jan K

Fionn E                Eleanor S             Marcel D

Bartosz L              Annabelle B         Oscar H

Charlie H             Rebecca W           Caleb F

Leighton S           Hattie S                Nicole S

Luke P                  Imogen C             Elizabeth W

Brooke L               Lucy M

MISSING 100 Word Story Competition

Last year, just before Easter, the English department ran a writing competition designed by Young Writers. The story was based on the one-word idea ‘MISSING’. The stories really could be about anything so long as they included something or someone who was lost or missing or not quite where they or it should be! The whole story also had to be told in only 100 words!

Five of our talented students were chosen from entries across the UK to have their exciting, imaginative stories included in the real-life, professionally printed book of short stories!

Congratulations to: Amera Mohamed, Sienna Cafferkey-Black, Ola Rasala, Lucy Allen and Holly Dawkins.

Year 7 Flu Vaccinations

If your child is in Year 7 they are therefore eligible for a free nasal childhood flu vaccination.

 The Immunisation Team are re-visiting John of Gaunt on Friday 4^th December  to offer a second opportunity for pupils to receive their flu vaccination if they have not received it previously. As before, this will be administered adhering to all up to date Infection Control, PPE and social distancing guidance at the time.

 Flu vaccination is one of the most effective interventions we have to reduce pressure on the health and social care system which is going to be more important than ever this year.  For this reason, it is essential we deliver the vaccine to as many children as possible to prevent the spread of infection to those most at risk in society.

 If you would like your child to receive their flu vaccination and HAVE NOT PREVIOUSLY COMPLETED an online consent, please use the link to consent to your child’s vaccination now. Even if you do not want your child to receive this vaccination, please complete the consent form stating “no” consent.  You will also find answers to your FAQ’s on this link.

 https://schoolimms.virgincare.co.uk/flu/2020/wilts

If you have previously completed an online consent for this academic year, you DO NOT need to complete another one. We hold the consents securely in our consent system and our team will use the existing one at the upcoming session.

 If you have any difficulties with completing the consent form or any further questions, please contact the Immunisation Team on their Single Point of Access (SPA).  Tel:  0300 247 0082        Email: vcl.immunisations@nhs.net

Introducing Year 7’s student leadership team for 2020-21! 

The Year 7 team are very pleased to say that the following students have been appointed out student leaders for the current academic year.

Lucas Cobbett, Marcel Dulas, Finley Giles, Ben Gregory, Xavier Heath, Hannah Hickey, Megan Lewis, Lucy Martin, Cameron Nash, Edward Raymond, Hattie Sargeant, JJ Smith, Libby-May Stevens, Eleanor Stevens, Danielle Travers, Diana Velea, Toby Wallis and Georgia Wells.

Our leaders were elected by their tutor groups and can be found around school consistently modelling our core values of Resilience, Respect and Responsibility (as well as their lovely new badges!)

Since September the team have been feeding back on their transition to secondary school and leading on Year 7’s random acts of kindness challenge, they’re now busy preparing some fundraising activities for the end of this term in aid of Cancer Research UK so please keep an eye out for these, and their regular subject spotlights.

A huge well done to our student leaders so far, we can’t wait to see what the rest of the year holds.

Mrs Addison, Miss Wood and Mrs Stewart.

This week there has been a lot of exciting activity in The John of Gaunt Sixth Form.

Several students have had the opportunity to have mock university interviews via Zoom. There have been applications to UCAS and university offers coming through! For those yet to send their applications, the internal deadline for this is Friday 4^th December.

Year 13 have now completed all their mock exams! Well done everyone! For students attending Clarendon, we wish you all the best of luck for mocks starting Monday 7^th December!

Our year 12 A Level Mathematicians and A Level English students took part in online conferences, facilitated through school, and we also had some Mathematicians take part in a Maths Challenge.

Year 11 Option Choices are coming in which is great! Anyone still to do this, please visit the school website and refer to the Sixth Form area. There are videos for each of the subject areas with lots of information. Thank you for the positive feedback on the website so far, we are really pleased with how this has been received by parents and students.

A Reminder – safer internet and social media use

We are a mobile device free school. We hope that parents will be able to monitor and support the use of students’ social media and other technology such as online gaming platforms whilst they are not in school. We appreciate that this can be difficult but we have recently experienced a few incidents where students have used social media outside of school and the impact has been that relationships between students has been difficult in school. We do cover internet safety and proper use within our curriculum but it is helpful if parents are able to support this by having additional conversations at home

All social media has an age restriction guide. If you allow your child to use a social media platform outside of the age restrictions then it can be very challenging for us, as a school, to address any issues resulting from this. The age restrictions are designed to reflect a young person’s ability to safely and responsibly navigate the risks and benefits of using this technology.

Below we have included 2 resources that you may find helpful when talking to your child about the use of social media and may help you to monitor the use of social media by your child. The first is a parent’s guide to social media that has been developed by Internet Matters, NSPCC, Parent Zone, and UK Safer Internet Centre

https://www.internetmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Internet-Matters-Guide-Official-UK-Social-Media-Guidance.pdf

The second is an easy to see guide relating to the age restrictions of different social media apps and services.

We hope you find this useful. If there are any issues you would like to discuss relating to your child and their use of these apps and the internet please contact your child’s tutor in the first instance or their Head of Year.