Dear all,

We have had a very enjoyable week at Holmleigh Park. We've now had over 100 prospective parents take a tour round the school and the standards of behaviour and learning have been higher than ever. 

I wanted to focus most of my letter this week on our reading programme. As you are hopefully aware, we think reading is incredibly important. Not only is there an incredibly strong link between how much students read and how successful they are in their GCSEs, but reading exposes you to other people and cultures, teaches you to empathise with those different to you, and can bring endless hours of imagination and pleasure. 

So each morning, every tutor group in Years 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12 read a book together. The books have been carefully selected to cover as broad a range of texts as possible, and you can see the list here. We finish the day by reading for 25 minutes too - this time, it's your child who chooses the book they read.

You can help us with this by also encouraging your child to read at home as much as possible. Our library remains open and we've added several hundred books over the summer to choose from, some of which you can see on the right:

Please note that in order to avoid mixing bubbles, students need to visit on their designated day: Year 7 on Monday, Year 8 on Tuesday and so on.

The other reason to promote reading is it helps develop vocabulary, and to help consolidate this we've signed up to Bedrock Learning. From half term, this will sit alongside Tassomai Science and Hegary/Sparx Maths to complete our full homework programme. More details will follow from the English department in due course. 

In other news, the next House Competition is up and running. Students have until the 21st October to submit their entry, on A5, to Miss Martin. This might seem like a long way away but the best entries will be entered in Richard Graham MP's annual competition - last year's winning card was from HP and was professionally printed and sent to thousands of constituents, along with the Prime Minister. It's a good chance to bag some points too - Meteor have crept back into the lead this week nudging just 9 points ahead of Javelin at time of writing!

Best wishes,

Mr Farmbrough