Head’s Newsletter -22nd March 2024

Dear parents and carers

Another busy week at Wollaston with Dance Live taking place and our wonderful students taking 3rd place overall and winning the prizes for the LED Screen Award and Journey to Dance Live award. Well done to all of our wonderful students who took part and a big thank you to the staff who made it all possible and of course the support of parents. We will do a special report next week!

Well done also to all of our ambassadors who took part in the student leadership conference this morning, see below for news on this from two of our amazing ambassadors.

Wollaston Student Leadership Conference 2

Year 11 Ambassadors Emmanuella Etengeneng and Adam Gibson write “Today Wollaston hosted the second student leadership conference and had a guest speaker, England Badminton star Liz Cann.
Session 1
Session one supported us on identifying our “energy zappers” e.g. having a messy room, organisation, and revision. By identifying these we will therefore naturally begin fixing them as we will be more conscious of our decisions making us more conscientious school leaders. Then Liz Cann challenged us to pick one action to address right now aiming to improve one of these “energy zappers “and challenge them. This exercise should help us become less held down and more resilient to achieve our short term and long-term goals.
Session 2
With Liz Cann, we spoke about our experiences and asked each other the question ‘Are you sitting too comfortably?’.
This was for us to question if we are in our comfort zone on auto pilot as we may be comfortable, but this isn’t pushing us to achieve better. Other questions we asked and answered as a group were:
· When was the last time you tried something new?
· How much are you learning and growing right now?
· Do you feel you’re doing too much – or not enough?
· When was the last time you took a risk?
· Do you feel like its time for a shift- or a change?
We then created ways to stop our ‘comfort continuation’ by creating a list to do either now or by the end of the day. After this we then spoke about how starting new things can also be stress full, from this we were taught new ways to help with this stress such as heart breathing and imagining the air coming out and into your lungs.
Session 3
Session 3 was about our daily success habits. Showing us how daily habits can lead to long term success, Liz asked us about our 3 priorities in life right now and our 3 stressors, and then about our 5 daily actions that will help us do this. These were simple things like making our beds or revising. This will be introduced with a “just do it” and “no regrets” attitude. Then there was a large focus on who we need to be do make this happen. And after a few months committing to our actions, we will become more resilient school leaders able to face the world with self-assurance confidence and strength.
Conclusion
Within this day learnt about all the ways to achieve the recipe for success, taking ownership in everything you do and never having any regrets. This day has given all the ambassadors ways to deal with new experiences, success habits, goal setting and stress. Many thanks to the Mintridge Foundation for this experience.”
Science Spelling BEE
Miss Hall writes: ‘To celebrate the 2024 British science week we held our second annual Science Spelling Bee house competition on Thursday. We had a brilliant turn out with 11 students across years 7-11 competing to be crowned spelling champion 2024. It was a tough competition that came down to Joseph Henderson (Y10) and Leo Clayton (Y11) battling head-to-head through several rounds of tough science spellings. Congratulations to Joseph Henderson who was crowned champion after correctly spelling ‘Amplitude’ then ‘Gravitational’, earning top points for Churchill house!’

Wollaston Scholars Class of 24

Mr Rees writes: ‘Thursday 29th February 2024 was a proud day for this year’s cohort of Scholars who attended Cambridge University to celebrate their graduation event!

Roll of Honour:
Year 10: Rosaline Fajinmi, Oliver Austin, Poppy McDermott, Evie Little, Freya-Mai Carter, Alfie Hardwick, Oskar Brice.
Year 9: Lillymay Regan, Kayden Omar, Mason Holden, Jacob Crimmins, Jamie White, Victoria Latimer, Keiran Hudson.

Throughout the first term 14 selected students have taken part in the aspirational Scholar’s Programme, gaining an insight into University life. These pupils were prepared to go above and beyond their workload to complete a university style programme and write a 1500 word essay in response to a specific subject. Thanks to Daryl Scott, their PhD tutor, the pupils learned first hand from a world expert how to analyse film narrative devices and construct a piece of work in response to a film of their own choosing.

The crowning glory of this process was the trip to Emmanuel College and St Catherine College Cambridge recently, which despite it being a wet day, there was nothing that could dampened their spirits!

The pupils enjoyed a presentation from The Brilliant Club and university staff before heading for a tour of the campus with some real life students! My favourite quotes were “Sir, this is actually Hogwarts isn’t it” (Mason), “I want to come to Cambridge University now” (Evie).

Following this they headed across to St Catherine College campus for the ceremony at which point there was a protest rally happening which was of great interest to the pupils – thankfully, we managed to not lose any pupils in the passing march!

Both Poppy, Oliver and Alfie did us proud offering their ideas to a lecture style discussion. Lillymay and Oliver went even further and took to the podium to make a speech at their graduation ceremony having been inspired by the course and meeting the Mayor of Cambridge. Both pupils spoke confidently and shared their insight and learning from the process.

Well done to all those pupils involved.

A very proud Mr Rees!’

Key Dates for the Diary
Wednesday 27th March – Last day of term
Thursday 28th March – Teacher Professional Development Day (No students in school on this day)
Monday 15th April – First day of the summer term

Best wishes for the week ahead.

Simon Anderson