Bedgrove Junior School Newsletter – July 2019

“INSPIRE, CHALLENGE, SUCCEED”

It has been yet another busy but fantastic year at Bedgrove Junior School. We have achieved so much since last September and I am really pleased that

our termly newsletters are able to celebrate all the great things that happen at our school. This, alongside, our well received Twitter feeds showcase all

the amazing opportunities that the children have here at Bedgrove Junior School.

One of our biggest highlights of this year has been joining the Great Learners Trust and becoming an academy. I am very proud that we were able to make

this brave and bold decision and it showcases the strength of our provision here. I am excited to get going with some collaborative projects with the other

GLT schools and look forward to sharing some of the great practice that happens here with other leaders across the trust. We will of course keep you

updated with this in the new academic year.

Bedgrove Junior School wouldn’t be the school it is without everyone involved in the school. I must take this opportunity to thank all of the staff here for

their continued hard work and commitment to the school. I would like to thank the children for being as wonderful as ever and for anyone moving on at

the end of this year I wish you the very best of luck at your new school. I would also like to thank you as parents for your continued support, especially to

all of those who support the school with the PTA, give up time to come and hear readers, have helped out with jobs in the last few weeks and anyone who

has offered support in any way. I would also like to thank our Governors who continue to provide support and challenge, and ensure that we continue to

challenge ourselves to improve.

I hope all of our families have a peaceful and restful summer break and I look forward to seeing all of our families and carers back with us in September.

Year 6 SATs Results

Last week we received our end of Year 6 SATs results and as ever I am very proud of the achievements of our children. Yet again we sit consistently above

national data in all areas of the curriculum which means that the vast majority of our pupils leave our school ready for the KS3 curriculum. Our results

were:

Reading % of pupils achieving ARE 85 % of pupils achieving GD 35

Writing % of pupils achieving ARE 88 % of pupils achieving GD 23

Maths % of pupils achieving ARE 85 % of pupils achieving GD 27

ARE - Age Related Expectation GD - Greater Depth

Learning for Our Future

School Development Plan & Policies

As we end the year we begin to think about our areas of development for the next academic year. Many of you may be aware that there is a new OFSTED

framework that will be used from September 2019 and as a school we must assess ourselves against this new framework. I am really pleased that our

self-evaluation shows that we are still judging our school as an outstanding provision but we always strive to improve. The following areas are where we

will be focusing next year:

Consistency of behaviour management ensuring that all pupils are managed in exactly the same way and that all staff use the policy consistently

with all pupils. This will include a re-vamp of the policy to ensure that our rewards far outweigh any sanction but where sanctions are applied

that they are fair, consistent and have impact.

Development of T4W – having used the Talk 4 Writing framework for three years now we feel it is time for a bit of a re-vamp. We are working

closely with Warren Road Primary School, who are a flagship T4W school, so that our writing outcomes continue to improve. One of these

changes will be introducing a poetry week before each fiction unit to improve vocabulary and expressive writing.

Development of maths mastery in to Year 5 to continue our journey of maths improvement through the school.

Development of the use of ICT across all lessons to engage and inspire pupils.

We look forward to sharing our school development plan with you in September.

Key Changes

There are some important changes to a small number of our school policies from September and some of these area attached for your reference – all

policies are available on the school website:

Behaviour policy will be shared in September

Homework policy – please note the key changes regarding log books which will now be referred to as extended homework challenges.

Marking and feedback policy – some minor changes in feedback given.

Staff goodbyes

As we end the year we say some very sad goodbyes. Of course, many of you know, Mr Magee is heading off to take up his first Headship at Great

Missenden School – whilst we will miss Mr Magee greatly around school we know that our relationship with his new school will be an exciting one for

both schools from September. We also say goodbye to Ms Millbank, Miss Crockett and Miss Dennington who are heading off for pastures new. I would

like to thank all of these staff members for their hard work during their time here.

We welcome Mrs Agnew as a trainee teacher in 6JH, and Mrs Siraj, Mrs Martin, Miss Cook and Mrs Payne as our new LSAs.

Expectations

I would like to make some expectations for September clear as we will be really focusing on ensuring the following areas are consistent across the school.

Uniform

Please refer to our uniform policy on the school website.

Winter uniform

Girls should be wearing a GREY (not black) school skirt, trousers or pinafore dress with a stiff collared white shirt, a purple school tie and jumper or

cardigan – all items should be clearly named. School shoes should be Velcro or buckle, and not slip on and should be low heel and black. Long hair should

be tied back and clips in hair should be kept to a reasonable size.

Boys should be wearing GREY trousers or shorts, with a stiff collared white shirt and a purple school tie and jumper– all items should be clearly named.

School shoes should be Velcro or buckle and not slip on and should be low heel and black. Long hair should be tied back for both boys and girls.

PE kit should be in school every day and should be black shorts or netball skirt and purple school logo polo shirt. All children should have trainers and a

tracksuit in their bag also.

Equipment

All children should come to school with the following items every day

Named non-spill water bottle – filled for the start of the day

Homework planner – provided by school but should be brought back in to school every day

Rucksack or similar for school items that fits in to their locker

A fully stocked pencil case including ruler, rubber and a glue stick, pen, pencils, colouring pencils. All pencil cases should fit in their drawer.

Vale Lottery

Just a reminder for parents to sign up to the Vale lottery page if you are able to. We have a growing group of supporters signed up to our page which

looks to raise about £900 per year.

The Vale lottery is a local lottery that runs in pretty much the same way as the National Lottery.

Parents can sign up via the link on the Vale Lottery website. 50% of the tickets sold comes to us and 10% goes to good causes in the local area. I know of

two local schools where this is raising a significant amount for the school and two parents have recently won a good pot of money too. We would be very

grateful to parents to sign up – tickets cost just £1 a week.

School Council

Congratulations to the following children who will be our Head Girls and Boys when they

start Year 6 in September:

Head Girl - Megan M Head Boy - Alfie T

Vice Head Girls - Esme A & Kimberley R Vice Head Boys - Easa-Omar K & Aaryan H

House Captains

Yellow House - Charlie H and Jessica W Green House - William J and Emily W

Red House - Terry B-B and Chloe P Blue House - Noah P and Edie-Mae H

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Daniella A in 6KH who has

achieved an incredibly impressive 100% attendance

for the whole 4 years she has been at Bedgrove

Junior School!

Class Stars of The Year

Year 3 Alex B, Charlie G, Lucas D, Ruby G Year 4 Jack H, Alys W, Aimee G, Orson L-B Year 5 Lucy S, Mac S, Alina R, Holly D Year 6 Safia H, Michelle P, Tilda S, Harriet R

Headteacher’s Awards

Year 3 - Jessica L

Year 4 - Harry F

Year 5 - Bo E

Year 6 - Caitlin R

Magee Cup for Academic Excellence

As part of Mr Magee’s legacy, he has donated 2 cups to be awarded every year to children who have consistently achieving above and beyond across the curriculum. Lower School - James G (4LC)

Upper School - Shaun G (6JH)

Pupil Parliament

Pupil parliament have had a busy year and they have made me very proud of the way they have conducted themselves around school. They have become

much more confident at sharing the views of their peers and we have made some significant changes to school life based on their feedback.

This term they met with David Lidington, MP for Aylesbury, to discuss parking outside of school. They spoke so confidently about their concerns about what

could happen and what they have already done as a result. They also shared some ideas of how they felt Mr Lidington could help. The children then spent

some time finding out what life is like as a Member of Parliament.

Year 3 News!

We have had such a busy half term and cannot believe how quickly this year has flown by!

After feeling inspired following our visit to ‘Cadburys World’ we have designed and made chocolate boxes, taking in

to account design features, information to be communicated to the customer and functionality of the boxes. We

looked at nets of shapes and experimented with making various 3D shaped boxes. We were really pleased with

our finished product and think they would really stand out on a supermarket shelf!

Also in Topic, we have designed and made cross stitch bookmarks. A huge thank you to those friends and family

members who joined us on the presentation afternoon to help with our sewing project. The children found stitching

much trickier than they anticipated but we were so impressed with the commitment and perseverance that they

showed and we know the children felt proud of their finished products which look fantastic.

We were so impressed with the wonderful sweet creations that the children produced as their log book challenge. The children enjoyed

showing them to the rest of the class and talked about how they were made. Thank you to all those who came along to the Fizz Whizz

parade to show off these fantastic pieces of art. We felt very proud of the children and we think they really stood out!

In English, we have based our lessons on the book, ‘Return’ by Aaron Becker. We have really shown off all we have learnt in Year

3 and have produced various different types of writing such as character and setting descriptions, a non-chronological report,

instructions and a story. The children have worked extremely hard to include all the different language features they know; expanded

noun phrases, adverbials, speech, similes, interesting sentence openers and powerful verbs.

A lot of time this half term, in Maths, has been spent practising using written methods for the four operations and using these to solve

problems. The children have also revised the fractions topic and have developed their ability to add and subtract fractions.

Our Science topic has been ‘Plants’. We started the half term by going for a walk through the Spinney and to the meadow in Bedgrove Park. We

looked for different types of plants and thought of different ways that we could sort them. We have also carried out an investigation to find out

the best conditions for growing cress and have observed how water is transported around a plant by placing celery in coloured water overnight.

We recently had an SMSC day (spiritual, moral, social and cultural development) and the children took part in a range of activities such as creating

art work from nature, making leaf rubbings and a scavenger hunt. The children worked well in teams and we had a really lovely day.

Thank you to all those parents who came along to Sports Day. The children enjoyed taking part in the various races and there were some good examples of

excellent sportsmanship. Well done to Yousafzai (Yellow) team who were the winners!

Finally, the children had a great time on their transition days. It was a great opportunity for them to get to know their new teachers and the expectations of

Year 4. They are all excited about starting year 4 and we are so proud of them for all they have achieved in Year 3. We hope you all have a fantastic

summer and that the children enjoy their well-deserved rest!

The Year 3 Team

Year 4 News!

Amazingly, we are now approaching the end of the year! We have had a jam packed final half term starting off with our sports week. The children showed fantastic sportsmanship and impressed us with their athletic skills. Some our children even went on to compete at District Sports. 4EA and 4LT also took part in a multi sports event at The Grange, where we had a great morning taking part in lots of different activities. We were very lucky to be able to host an engineering day with four engineers from Lockheed Martin. They inspired us to reach new heights throughout the day! We designed, built and launched our own bottle rockets using only water and air power – we couldn’t believe how high they went! The children really impressed us with their insightful questions and thirst for knowledge. In keeping with our topic, the children had the opportunity to create their own mint tin Monet scenes. The children first created their own watercolour Japanese landscape pictures and then carefully

moulded plasticine to create a lily pond. The children’s final products look incredible! As part of our Healthy Minds sessions, the children were entirely responsible for organising and running a community project. Thanks to the children we raised £184.78 for Calibre, a local charity.

Over the Summer Holidays, to ensure that the children are ready to move into Year 5 please try to:

Read regularly (Accelerated Reader quizzes will only work from September)

Continue using Spelling Shed, Mathletics and Times table Rockstars

Give the children some pocket money to go to the shops to practise budgeting and calculating change

Practise telling the time, analogue and digital

The children can continue to use Purple Mash all over the Summer Holidays

And most importantly … have fun!

Lastly, we would just like to thank you for your continued support – it really does help!

Many Thanks, Year 4 Team

Year 5 News!

We cannot believe that this is the final newsletter for Year 5. It has been a very busy year with lots of excitement and fun along the

way.

We have continued to work on our writing skills, working hard on our speeches for Year 6 roles has been very exciting and the

children who wanted to apply have now presented these to the rest of the year group and teachers. We have also written

explanations for all sorts of machines, both real and imaginary! When the children look back to the start of the year it is wonderful

to see the progress that they have made. Now that they are ‘old hands’ at life in Year 5 they are writing advice leaflets for the upcoming

Year 4s and these will be shared with Year 4 at the start of the Autumn Term.

In maths we have been focussing on shape and measure – identifying how to measure and convert lengths, weight and capacity. The

children have been putting this into real life situations and considering if their answers are reasonable.

Throughout the year in our topic lessons, we have moved from inventions and changes in past societies, to how

our Earth is made up and how earthquakes and volcanoes occur, to creating our own moving toys, inventions

and products in our Wonderful World of Walliams topic. Our final topic has allowed the children to really

develop their design, prototype and making skills, as well as improving their clay work skills with the help of

Pippa from Queen’s Park Arts Centre. They have also really developed their team work skills, learning to

persevere and compromise. During our sewing day the children were able to show their own sewing skills

but also show how they could support each other to create an end product. The children also created their

wonderful presentation to parents, writing and performing plays and poems as well as showing some of their

wonderful work created in class. We are sure you will agree that the children really showed their learning brilliantly

and put on a wonderful show. We would like to say a big thank you to all parents who came to see this as it really meant a lot

to the children and teachers to see you there.

Over the year, we have been lucky enough to have Miss Knight completing her teacher training with us and we are

thrilled to announce that she has passed her training year with flying colours and an outstanding assessment. We

would like to wish Miss Knight huge congratulations on this achievement.

It really has been a wonderful year with our Year 5 children and we will miss them greatly next year but know they will have an amazing time

in Year 6 (Miss Leonard is there to keep a close eye). We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the children for their hard work

and all of the parents/carers for their support.

We hope you all have a wonderful summer and look forward to seeing the children back in September for another fantastic year.

Many thanks

The Year 5 Team

Year 6 News!

It’s quite hard to believe that we are already saying farewell to our year 6s; what a year we’ve had too! There have certainly been some bumps along the

way but ultimately the children have had a successful and enjoyable year (even if they don’t want to all admit this).

Over the final term, children have been preparing themselves for their new secondary schools. We’ve

had many successful transition visits, meetings with new heads of year and visits from various groups of

people. The year 6’s worked well with students from the John Colet on an electricity science project,

past Bedgrove students visited us to give the pupils helpful hints for surviving year 7, Nick (and his team

from the Church of the Holy Spirit) delivered a lesson on moving on and we were lucky enough to have

presentations from parents about their exciting jobs.

Children who went to River Dart had a wet, muddy and incredible time – some faced fears and found

that actually they could do more than they thought. Those children who stayed behind had an equally

good week and enjoyed their time at a Woburn and the cinema.

We managed to squeeze in DT and Art work in between the children being in and out of school over the final weeks. We have produced some fantastic

cushions and some stunning pop art and propaganda posters.

Lots of our time has been taken up with rehearsals for our production and I think everyone can agree that all the hard work paid off. The children were

phenomenal and made the year 6 team feel incredibly proud and emotional. We are now putting together our leavers’ assembly and look forward to seeing

you all on the last day of term to celebrate with us.

Looking back, we can smile and be proud of how far we’ve all come; the progress we’ve made and the way we’ve all grown is something to be admired. Our

SATs results have been fantastic again this year, showing just how well our pupils can do when they put their heads down. There have been many highlights

of our time together in year 6 and we hope the children remember these fondly: River Dart, Thorpe Park, the

Victorians, SATS breakfast, our sporting achievements, Mrs Taylor doing the splits, Mrs Hurrell falling over, Great

Barrier Reef project and Shakespeare week – just to name a few.

The year 6 team wish the class of 2019 huge amounts of luck as they all head

off on their new journeys; we send them forward with this final message:

You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and

smarter than you think.

Good luck and make yourselves proud!

The Year 6 Team

Sports Desk

As another very busy year ends, we would like to thank everyone who has participated in sport this year for their efforts. We will definitely miss our Y6 cohort, but wish them well as they move on to secondary school. They are a very talented group and great things await them if they continue to seize the moment and put 100% effort into sport and the performing arts. We wish them well in their future endeavours, but also look forward to working with the next group of students in the new school year. We have participated in 77 fixtures across the year, in 15 different sports, including badminton, futsal, basketball, dance and gymnastics, running 15 different extracurricular sports clubs, for all abilities, attended by 380 pupils, widening experiences, underlining enjoyment of physical activities and forging what will hopefully become a lifelong love of sport. We have loved every moment of our non-competitive multiskills events, with a

highlight of the school year, watching our Y6 children teaching our Y3 children new skills in handball, cricket, basketball and throwing and catching. Our recent transition event, where Y2 and Y3 children worked together on

PE skills, led wonderfully well by students from The Grange School, was another extremely enjoyable and effective day. In competition, we have seen many great results, including winning the Y6 Games, reaching the Bucks & Milton Keynes School Games Finals in Handball, Netball, Girls Football, Hockey and Swimming, winning the latter event and also the Hockey Fair Play award. Our teams won the Football League, Girls Football League and Netball League, with our girls’ team also reaching the National Final of the English Schools FA Futsal Competition, travelling to St George’s Park to compete.

We value the efforts of every child who has taken part in our events and look forward to many more new experiences in the coming year. Finally, a massive thank you to all parents, whether supporting children at events or providing feedback such as the recent Sports Day survey. Your comments are very much appreciated and will be used to inform our planning for the next school year. We continue to work on the huge list of sporting contacts and information provided by yourselves, with the intention of increasing the number of visits from external sports providers in the coming year. If you have any further comments to make regarding PE, including suggestions or ideas, please do

not hesitate to contact us on pe@bedgrovejunior.bucks.sch.uk. Have an amazing summer.

Governing Bedgrove Junior School

It has been a busy term for the Local Governing Board (LGB) at BJS since joining the Great Learners Trust. The change to the composition of the LGB created

a vacancy for a staff governor, the intention being to ensure we secured the perspective of both teaching and non-teaching staff on the Board. I am

therefore delighted to announce that, following nominations, Miss Jodie Haynes has been elected, unopposed, to the position of staff governor. We look

forward to welcoming her onto the LGB in September.

We also say goodbye to two governors at the end of this term. Alan Rosen has been a committed and hard-working member of the board since 2013 and

has been instrumental at the strategic level in the school’s improvement journey and good financial management since joining us. His skills and knowledge

will be missed. Johnny Magee has been, first, a staff governor and, latterly, a co-opted governor in addition to being a highly effective teacher, assistant

headteacher and more recently deputy headteacher in his time as BJS. He has had a hugely positive impact on the school and the governing board and we

will miss him too. However, we look forward to continuing to work with him as headteacher of a school on the Great Learners Trust.

The LGB has undertaken a wide variety of monitoring activities, including visits and meetings, this term to hear for ourselves about the continued

implementation of various aspects of the school development plan, how the school works with children with SEND, how safeguarding and health & safety

are managed and the way we use the pupil premium to support disadvantaged children.

We heard very positive feedback from pupils, teachers, LSAs and parents on areas such as safeguarding, wellbeing, workload, school trips and the broader

curriculum, transition, the growth mindset and staff training. And the impact of actions taken by leaders and teachers was clear to see. Children feel safe

and are very happy at BJS, teachers make their learning fun, parents are happy with the progress their children make and the way this is reported, teachers

feel very well supported, work as a team and morale is very good. The very small number of reported cases of bullying are treated very seriously and

investigated by members of the senior leadership team. And while behaviour generally is very good, the LGB agree with the assessment of school leaders

that this should receive a renewed focus next year to ensure even greater consistency.

The LGB has been working with the school business manager to ensure a smooth transition from a maintained school to an academy. This involved

developing and monitoring a 5 month academy budget from April to August 2019, scrutinising the school’s proposed budget for September 2019-August

2020 and working with the GLT to ensure a shared understanding of our financial reporting. In addition, the LGB approved spending to complete the

classroom refurbishments in Y4, refurbish the kitchen next to the school hall to better support our daily provision of Spice Club, as well as spending to

update our intruder alarm system.

The LGB would normally conduct surveys of staff, parents and children in the summer term, but we agreed to postpone them until the autumn term to

bring them in line with surveys undertaken across the GLT schools. However, we welcome feedback at any time so please do contact us at

governors@bedgrovejunior.bucks.sch.uk if you wish to do so.

Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to all the members of the Local Governing Board for their significant contribution over the last year. As volunteers

they have all given considerable time and energy to play their part in governing Bedgrove Junior School by supporting and challenging the amazing staff we

have here to continuously improve to provide the best possible education for all our children and I am grateful to them all.

Helen Bush Chair, Local Governing Board

Have a wonderful summer break!