This week’s Living and Learning theme has centred around manners. Good manners help people to get on well with others. Encourage your child to greet people politely (including the adults as they arrive at school), to say please and thank you, and to avoid interrupting. Like everything else, this sometimes needs practice! 

Cooking

Over the course of the year, your child will enjoy three opportunities to prepare food:

• Year 1 and 2: banana sandwich, fruit salad, a wrap
• Year 3 and 4: leek and potato soup, pitta pizza, and salad and dressing
• Year 5 and 6: lentil and vegetable soup, omelette, and a tomato sauce base

We’ve a couple of requests, please:

Most importantly, please alert us to any allergies your child has. We’ll do our best to adapt recipes.

To make sure that we can continue to offer this, please make a voluntary donation of £3 to £6 to pay for the ingredients. We really appreciated your donations last year.

For more about our Cooking curriculum, please check out our Cooking and Nutrition Curriculum Guide – they include the recipes and background information including the food preparation skills children will practise. (We’re in Year A this year.)

Relationships and Sex Education

At the start of each year, we like to encourage you to be aware of our Relationships and Sex Education Policy.

Later in the year, your child will have Relationships and Sex Education lessons. In those lessons, we’ll talk about anatomical terms and different relationships. However, we might need to use the terms at other times, such as when dealing with incidents of misuse or disrespectful language, and we’ll talk about lots of different relationships at any time of the year, too.

End of Key Stage 2 outcomes (SATs)

We’re proud of our 2025 Key Stage 2 outcomes. These are the SAT tests which our 2024-25 Year 5 pupils did in May.

74% of our pupils achieved the expected standard in Reading, Writing and Maths, combined – this is securely above the national figure of 62%. Greater proportions than national reached the expected standard in each subject, too:

• Reading: 79% meeting expected standards (national: 75%)
• Writing: 81% meeting expected standards (national: 72%)
• Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling: 76% meeting expected standards (national: 73%)
• Maths: 79% meeting expected standards (national: 74%)

Well done to all the pupils.

Staying safe

As you and your child settle back into school routines, keep online safety top of mind this school year.

Check out these parent guides to help get you up to speed on what children are up to online and any risks you should be looking out for.

Finally this week, a message from the Department for Education…

Best start in life

The Best Start in Life website replaces the Childcare Choices website as the main source of information for early education and childcare support – offering a broader range of resources for families, including eligibility for childcare offers, information about free breakfast clubs and Best Start Family Hubs in their area, and support on pregnancy through to starting school and beyond. Although the website has changed, the offers for parents – such as support for working parents and the 2-year-old childcare offer – are not affected.

The weather feels like summer is months ago. One of the joys of autumn is seeing the excitement on children’s faces when they collect conkers. Over the weekend, why not look out for other signs of autumn?