Dear colleagues,

I sent an email at the end of the week encouraging everyone to feedback on the council budget saving proposals. These are some proposed cuts to the way schools are funded and the council is keen to get your views on them.  Broadly speaking, for schools, suggestions include:

• reducing music tuition available

• remove school counselling

• fewer educational psychologists

• reduce ASN staff

• take away some SLAs

• provide fewer pupils free transport (change from 2 miles to 3 miles radius)

• change the SCOTS programme for S3 & 4

It would be great if you could give your views on the potential impact of losing these.

Here is a link to the form:  Savings Options.

I have emailed parents and shared a link to the pupil version on each yeargroup Google Classroom.  Please could FCLs could encourage pupils to respond on issues that might affect them.

Thanks for your contribution to ensuring prelims have run smoothly.  The final few are on Monday & Tuesday this week. It has become a huge operational task that requires everyone to play their part.  They have gone very smoothly.  It has been great to get positive feedback from the parents who help with invigilation.

Thanks again for your part in enforcing our mobile phone policy.  There were 0 confiscations last week.  At the leadership team meeting we shared some examples of practice that are working well. I have put a very short video together showing some examples.  The working group met on Wednesday and reviewed the feedback from staff survey.  The notes from the meeting are further below.  Here are the actions:

1. reminders/ tannoys for seniors returning

2. Texts go home for confiscations

3. SEEMiS exemptions will flagged under pastoral on SEEMiS (phone & headphones)

4. Share good practice - EB through BM and at Team meetings

5. White tip ex/sharpie pen? - EB to look into buying white pens to help with numbering slots in boxes

Our Learning, Teaching & Assessment policy has been updated in draft.  The Leadership Team reviewed and fedback on it last week. Please make yourself familiar with the new draft policy.  Feedback for improvement would be much appreciated.

Thank you for your responses to the survey on closing down school social media accounts.   The reason for working toward this is that social media has become an unsafe, unfiltered machine.  Increasingly bots have been tagging accounts with a large following (we have 4k) and linking to pages that are not in keeping with our values. If you use one of our school accounts, I am keen to hear from you.  Please could you give me your views through this short survey by Wednesday 22nd.

At the leadership team meeting, I asked PTs to remind everyone that we should be in and ready to start before the bell. Even if you do not have a form class, or period 1 class on a Tuesday, we expect everyone to be in before the bell so that we can plan for absences and be ready to meet and great young people. I appreciate your professionalism with this.

David will run two assemblies this week to support course choice. They will run on Wednesday (S2/3) and Thursday (S4/5).  The updated Assembly Programme is on the Notice Board list to the right.

Massive thanks to those who give time to help with supervision.  Given the seniors return this week, we are all hands to the deck again. Help with this is important to ensure we maintain a calm school.  Please check the rota and amend if necessary.

Thanks in advance for your professionalism and hard work. Have a great week.   #buildingfuturestogether

Elaine