It always excites me to see our students performing at the highest levels. It is no surprise then that staff very much enjoyed seeing our students on stage at the Reflections event at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and also at the Hippodrome to perform in ‘The Lion King’ last week. It is opportunities like this that make JQA and CORE Education Trust stand out.
This week on Tuesday sees our final CORE Extra sessions of the year: we have had astronomy, Latin, chess, patisserie, clubs about the environment and exploring different cultures, musical theatre, French cinema and much more. It has been wonderful to give students such opportunities this year and I’d like to thank all parents for their support. CORE Extra resumes on Tuesday 12th September with even more exciting options to choose from, no doubt.
We have some more wonderful opportunities coming up this week such as the Brilliant Club trip to University of Birmingham, the Blue Orange Theatre trip to watch Macbeth and continued further work with Goldman Sachs as well as the LionHeart programme in school too. There is also a Remembering Srebrenica football tournament coming up ahead of the international commemoration events next week and we are heading along to the Priory on Thursday as a Senior Team to watch the CORE Leaders of Tomorrow students’ final videos. We also are looking forward our Key Stage 3 Twycross Zoo trip today. Some of our students are abroad too, exploring historic parts of northern France.
The situation in France after the horrific killing of Nael, a 17 year old boy shot by a police officer, was something we explored with our students in Personal Development on Friday. We have excellent relationships with the police through our partnership work via our liaison PC Steve Mason. However, we are aware of the disproportionate use of ‘stop and search’ that affects members of our community. We have again reminded students of the Sharp System to let us know if anything happens to ever worry them and this platform is the way to always alert us if they need support.
It was wonderful to see students back after the Eid celebrations with family. I’d like to thank all families whose child only missed the allocated one day of school.
We have two days of strike action by teachers again who are members of the NEU this week: Wednesday and Friday. I have written a letter confirming arrangements. Years 7-9 will be accessing our remote learning provision from home (more information here), with Year 10 coming into JQA and leaving at 13.30 after lunch.
As we look ahead to the end of term, I’d like to thank all families for their support in making sure uniform standards remain high. The Summer holidays bring a lot of opportunities for our students to get involved in local clubs via the Bring It On Brum programme. Activities include sports, dance, arts, crafts and music and all clubs offer children a free lunch too. More information is in this letter here: https://www.corejewelleryquarter.academy/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/Bring-it-on-Brum-Summer-2023-Letter.pdf and families can start booking their children into clubs from today by going to https://bringitonbrum.coordinate.cloud/ Our unique sign up code is: 3304016.
As always, you can call the Academy on 0121 729 7220, leaving a message if the line is busy and we will get back to you. Our line is very busy in the daytime so I encourage parents to use the voicemail facility by pressing option 2. If you would like urgent support, you can always reach Mr Bibb (our Designated Safeguarding Lead) on option 4.
You can always contact me directly at: [email protected]