Dear Parents and Guardians

I hope you have had a good week and been able to enjoy the public holidays. School is busy as ever as the exam season is fully upon us and our Year 13 and Year 11 learners are applying all that they have learned and prepared. The IGCSEs and IBDP courses are rigorous academic courses that help learners prepare for university. It has been fantastic to see our Year 13 learners receiving offers for their dream courses at  universities around the world. This Monday saw learners taking language exams in their first languages, we had Vietnamese, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Estonian and Chinese. The IBDP provides learners with the opportunity to develop their home language as well as learning new languages and is great preparation for further education. and global citizenship.

Whilst grades are important they do not define us,  they simply show how we did against a set of criteria at one moment in time. At Nexus we value feedback above all else as this is how we learn and grow. We introduced Canvas our learning management platform to help us with this and encourage you to use the website rather than the app to see your child's work and the feedback on it. We have nearly had Canvas for two years now and we know we have not mastered it fully yet. By logging on to the website version you should always be able to see what your child is learning, how they are doing and how they can do even better. We are working on improving consistency as we know that experiences vary. at present. 

Some of our examined courses have elements of coursework. With Chat GPT and other advances in AI there is great temptation to use this instead of creating work ourselves. Our Academic Integrity policy outlines what is considered as academic dishonesty. AI generated material has its place and can be a great starting place however it is worth noting that failing to cite work generated by AI or submitting work that is purely created by AI is considered academic dishonesty and can result in learners be disqualified from qualifications. Whilst we do educate the learners about this it really helps if there is dialogue at home too. Please encourage your child to experiment with AI as a tool to support their learning but please warn them that reliance on it alone to create work is not acceptable. At present they are still smarter than AI!

I really encourage you to regularly discuss your child's learning with them and not just the grades. Over emphasis on grades can lead learners to having self-limiting beliefs. Once these beliefs are internalised they become the child's inner narrative and they no longer believe they can achieve. This is hard to undo. We all need to feel someone believes in us to help us believe in ourselves. 

Wishing you all a lovely weekend

Best wishes

Dr Heather

Head of Secondary