Friday 14th June

Happy Friday!

The summer term is now passing very quickly, and we only have five weeks left of the academic year. One of our main priorities for the coming weeks will be preparing your children for the next stage of their education. You should have received a letter today, via ParentMail, detailing some of our transition arrangements including the date for Meet the Teacher on Wednesday 3rd July.

We have almost completed our recruitment processes for next academic year, with only two additional teaching assistant posts left to be advertised. At Olive Hill we operate with a senior leadership team of four, and as you are all very aware, the headteacher will be on maternity leave for the majority of the next academic year. Miss Walters will be the acting headteacher during this time. Miss Walters will be supported by three assistant headteachers - Miss Homer, Mrs Shinner and Mrs Higgins. A huge congratulations to Mrs Higgins who was appointed as acting assistant headteacher last week. We are very proud of the leaders we grow at Olive Hill.

Our senior leaders are supported by other leaders from across the school, both Mrs White and Miss Raphael will be taking on extra responsibilities next academic year as we move to a temporary structure of upper and lower school, rather than three phases. Mrs White will lead lower school (nursery, reception, year one and year two) and Miss Raphael will lead upper school (year three, year four, year five and year six). Mrs Williams will continue to look after our budget, HR, and health and safety (and with tightening school budgets her job definitely has it’s challenges).

All of our leaders are supported by the most amazing team of staff, no matter what role they are in they always put the children first. As a school we want to retain the very best adults for our children, so we do have a number of job shares across the school. By allowing our staff more flexibility in their working patterns we know our children are getting the very best. As leaders, it is important we look after the staff as they will then look after our precious children, giving them every opportunity to succeed in their education.

This week we have completed our statutory assessments in year one and year four. Year one worked incredibly hard in their phonics screening and some of them have made phenomenal progress. Well done year one, we are very proud of you. Year four undertook their multiplication check, consistently showing a fantastic attitude towards the test and we had some very high scores. Well done year four, we have been very impressed!

At Olive Hill, it isn’t all about our academic achievements, we also want to celebrate achievements across other areas of the curriculum (and we love to share the children’s achievements from home also). This week our girl’s football team played in the finals of the Dudley Girl’s Football Tournament and showed excellent sportsmanship throughout. They were up against some tough competition and gave all of their matches their best shot. We are so proud of them and will continue to celebrate them making it to the finals out of 48 schools.

Loudmouth theatre company visited our year six children this week to perform a piece around the issues of growing up. Year six watched the performance intently, and then asked very thought provoking questions to the actors at the end.

Thank you to all of the families who supported with donations for our Summer Family Festival - there was certainly a lot of chocolate and biscuits arriving in school this morning. The children have enjoyed wearing their own clothes today, some were definitely getting ready for the start of the Euros! It was also lovely to see children attend school in clothes from their culture, to see them proudly sharing their identity in this way was wonderful and it is lovely that our non-uniform days give them this opportunity.

Happy Eid to our families who will be celebrating on Monday. We look forward to hearing all about the celebrations when your children return to school on Tuesday.

Enjoy the weekend everyone - and let us hope we do get some summer weather soon!