St Cecilia's News

Dear Parents,

I hope that the first half term has gone well for your family. In school, it's been lovely to get back to a relative normality, to be mixing classes and year groups once again. I had a lovely lunch this week with the children, it's great to be engaging fully with them once again. Mrs Martin, subject leaders and I have resumed our visits to classrooms to see the children and teachers at work. It has been so refreshing to sit beside the children once again, to join them on their learning journey.

It's great to have our youngest children in school and settled - a warm welcome again to all of our new parents. Children in Nursery and Reception have settled so well, we can clearly see how they are gaining confidence in their new settings. I am amazed how in only a few weeks they have learnt new systems and processes and are showing increasing ability and skill in all aspects of their learning.

Year 1 presented their Harvest Festival this week, a lovely moment in which each and every child shone, I was so impressed in their delivery, their beautiful singing and teamwork. it was lovely to see the children back in the hall in front of an audience, thank you parents for supporting this assembly.

Please note that we return on Monday 1st November.

It has been a long and challenging half term for all of us, I hope that you have a lovely half term break and some good time with the family, safe travels for those of you who are away, see you in November!

Vince Burke

Head Teacher

Congratulations to Year 1 who have had an amazing Mission Week, our first here at St Cecilia's. They have been focussing on how for some people in these challenging times it can be difficult to provide the basics and they have been collecting food and toiletries for Epsom Foodbank. Thanks to all of you, across the school for your donations, the charity were completely surprised by the van load of supplies that they collected.

Our Mission weeks bring a week of connected learning and experiences to support the mission of the school, they enable the children to show witness to our faith, to truly show that we love our neighbours.

The first part of the Mission of the school is "sharing god's love." Thank you parents and children for helping us to fulfill our Mission this week.

Many thanks to all those parents who joined us for our online meeting to discuss the school's policy on relationships and sex education, the new national curriculum subject which all schools are implementing this year. We will be including your suggestions in the curriculum plan, you can find full details of the curriculum on our website.

I hate to mention Christmas in October but please put a date in your diary, the PTA Christmas Fair will take place on Friday December 3rd, after school. This year we are expanding the space, stalls will be in the Early Years area, the hall and in front of years 1&2.

Our last after-school Christmas fair was such a great success, we will build on that with an even bigger version this time.

More news on this from the PTA soon, in the meantime if you can help us prepare on the afternoon of the fair or run some stalls for us please get in touch with the PTA directly via

stceciliaspta@ymail.com We need your help!

We had the Annual General Meeting of the PTA this week, many thanks to all those who supported this meeting, it's good to to hear that Mr Alexander Noakes (Chair) and Mrs Alanna Bergin (Secretary) had been elected once again. There is still a vacancy for treasurer - if you are interested please get in touch with them.

We are closed on Monday 15th November for one of our staff training days when staff come together to work together with other schools, this year we are working with the academic and author Alan Peat on Exciting Sentences.

The other INSET days have been added to the calendar already and are attached to holidays.

We just have one day left to notify, that will take place around a month after our OFSTED inspection, which we are expecting later this year!

The London Grid for Learning are a trust which provides e-learning services to schools, including St Cecilia's. They have a good website which provides information to parents around the topic of online abuse and threats from poor internet security. They also have information on apps you can download to restrict and monitor your child's behaviour online. For more information see the link below.

https://parentsafe.lgfl.net/

Many thanks to all those who have come forward as potential volunteers. Mrs Saunders will be in touch shortly to arrange your safeguarding check and Mrs Martin will arrange a volunteering safeguarding and information session with you.

If you would like to volunteer in school please get in touch. We have vacancies for:

• library helpers
• regular readers
• forest school helpers

It's best if you can commit to a regular time each week.

We recently received a donation from the PTA for over £8000 towards three new initiatives:

• playground markings
• ipads for use by class teachers and pupils for video and photographs on Google Photos
• a set of robots for use across the school

Thank you parents for this donation, the children are really enjoying the new markings and the robots. The ipads have enabled us to set up a central photo and video store in the Google Cloud, this will help us to share some wonderful memories of your child's time with us when they leave us in Y6.

We hope that your child is enjoying our emphasis on bouncing back as the pandemic continues. We have sent home a poster on our BOUNCEBACK message - we hope that it has been useful in family life, things work best when we can use connected messages when talking to the children.

I had a lovely lesson with Y3 St Augustine this week when we learnt more about "Nobody's Perfect," it's fine to fail and learn from our mistakes, everyone makes mistakes.

In Y3 St Monica we were learning about how harmful "catastrophising" can be. The children quite rightly said that we should not see catastrophes in simple situations that we can manage.

Please help us to keep the Bounceback message going at home, the children are finding it very useful, I hope that it will enable a much more positive mental health position for our children.

Thank you to all those who came out for the Marsden Coffee Morning last month, you raised £515 plus the contents of two charity boxes, an amazing amount and a lovely get together, thanks for supporting this event and a lovely local charity.

We are pleased to welcome back Mrs Everton as Class Teacher of St Angela's Class from Monday 1st November. We give a big thanks to Mrs Callaghan for covering Mrs Everton's maternity leave at the start of this term and wish her well with the birth of her own baby at the end of the year. If well, she will be back in school after the half term holiday to say goodbye to the class.

Swimming is back on the curriculum this year and we have been able to book places for Years 3, 5 and 6. Morden Pool are not offering swimming for KS1 this year.

The first of our classes will attend after the half term break:

Y3 St Augustine 2 weeks from 1 November.

Y3 St Monica 2 weeks from 25 April.

Y5, both classes, 2 weeks from 9 May.

Y6, both classes, 2 weeks from 6 June.

Swimming will now be taught through ten one hour lessons over a two week period. Further details are being sent to parents nearer the time. The cost of swim classes and transport to the pool have risen, we ask parents to contribute towards the cost of transport, the school meets the full cost of the swimming lessons.

We have more information on swimming on our website

https://www.stcecilias.school/Curriculum/Swimming/

We have chosen SchoolCloud - a provider for an online booking system for ECAs - the same provider as our Parent Teacher Meeting system.

ECA Season 2 will go live for bookings in December, we will let you know in plenty of time. We are grateful to all of our providers for the current offer for Season 1 which ends on Friday 26th November.

We have our Parent Teacher meetings on Tuesday 9th and Thursday 11th November. Bookings go live on Monday 1st November at 8pm.

Due to the continuing pandemic and the number of cases we are seeing in school and in the local community, we will be hosting this event online again. I hope that our Spring meeting will be in person.

You can login to book using the link below, the system will also send you through a reminder email.

The Y4 parent teacher meetings for St Angela's Class have been arranged separately due to a change of class teacher. Mrs Callaghan's meetings were postponed, they will be rescheduled once Mrs Callaghan has recovered from COVID, we will be back in touch.

Don't forget to register with our fundriasing programme if you shop regularly at Sainsbury's and Argos.

London Road, Sutton, Surrey, SM3 9DL

Email: office@stcecilias.school
Website: www.stcecilias.school
Phone: 020 8337 4566

Flyer from Football academy with sessions at Goals on Saturday mornings.

Councillor Jenny Batt has been in touch about a local consultation that is taking place.

''The Worcester Park neighbourhood consultation will begin on Monday 18th October and conclude on Monday 13th December.

You will be able to access the online consultation via the citizen space hub from today up to when it closes on Monday 13 December. Please do take part and have your say about what you want for Worcester Park. Letters are going out over the next few days to all residents, businesses and schools in Worcester Park ward with more details and will say how to obtain a paper copy if you don't have online access. The provisional date for the drop in session is Thursday 18th November 2021, 11am - 2pm and 4pm - 7pm - Royal British Legion, 69-73 Central Road, Worcester Park KT4 8EB''