Every week I tend to start these updates saying it has been a busy week, to be fair, this week is no exception. We began with two days of interviews recruiting to our Literacy to Life team and we have made some really excellent appointments based on those interviews. We are now advertising out for our last few positions and just after Easter we hope to be fully staffed with excellent qualified teachers. We will then start our non-teaching recruitment.

As you may have seen from our ‘Meet the Team’ page, we have released details of our Assistant Principal and SENCo, two key appointments who will help drive forward the Academy, we are adding more details to this area of the site day by day, putting human faces to the Academy. I have always said, it is the staff, students and families which will make this a successful community not the building and as more staff are added and we receive information from the Primary Schools it becomes closer and closer to reality.

We released information this week on our house and form system, some more uniform screenshots and on the possibility of students attending a ski trip in conjunction with Shireland Collegiate Academy. This is a real example of how working together will provide opportunities for the students. We are also in the process of signing a Trust wide partnership with the Birmingham Hippodrome which will bring us some fantastic benefits and I will talk more about this in a future news article.

On the roadmap for next week:

• We have the DFE coming to see our progress and this will be combined with a site visit, the last before the holidays.
• There will be more information released about our after school enrichment activities. We expect every member of staff to deliver something so there will be a host of opportunities.
• We are starting a programme of reaching out to community partners and seeing how they can be part of Academy life.
• As we get more information about students we are starting to think about the composition of our forms and houses.

There is plenty more, but largely on the administrative side as we continue to put all the structures in place before opening.

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend and a great final week before the Easter break.

George Faux

Principal