February 2022
Term 3 has come with a bang! This newsletter is a bit late as we have been so busy trying to plan and deliver new and exciting experiences for your children! Read on for up to date information on events and points of interest.
Staffing
Staffing is very good just now and remains stable. Since January we have had a little flurry of COVID cases – both pupils and staff, and we remain mindful of all mitigations in place to help protect everyone. You will receive a standard letter reminding you of mitigations and self-protection each time we have a positive case in school.
We offer a warm welcome to our 2 new support for learning workers – Miss Cullen and Mrs McIntyre. They are such a great addition to our staff team and have settled well to the Royston way! Pupils have started to build lovely positive relationships with both of them.
Regular partners
Following on from staffing information I thought it might be useful for you to know about some of our school partners. These people come to school regularly to work with various children at different stages.
Citywise – this is a voluntary organisation linked to Glasgow University. University students apply and train to become mentors for selected P7 pupils. The mentors work with pupils to develop their confidence and self-esteem, in addition to planning a vision for their future. In the process the pupils also gain a little insight into further education and learning beyond school. The mentors are all different nationalities and share their experiences of education with the pupils. It is an excellent opportunity.
Reading Partners – As some of you may know, the school building is used on a Sunday by Re:Hope church group. The members are very nice and like to support the school whenever they can. At present 3 of the members come to school on a Tuesday afternoon to read and play chess with some of our pupils. They do this on a voluntary basis. Pupils can read, play chess and chat with the volunteers, all under careful supervision by authorised school staff. It allows pupils the opportunity to read and gain from other people’s experiences in life, learning about developing a friendship with a new person. Excellent opportunity to develop life skills.
Royston Youth Action Boys Health Group – The health groups have been a successful venture at RYA for some time and, because of their success, we invited RYA staff into school to work with some of our boys. Mark and Mark from RYA come along to school on a Wednesday afternoon to work with 7 P6 boys. They address aspects of self-care, self-image, gender stigma and solution focusing. The boys are really enjoying this opportunity and we are grateful to RYA for supporting us in this way.
North Glasgow Community Food Initiative – We continue to work closely with NGCFI who deliver cookery and gardening sessions for our pupils and families. Pupils absolutely love the opportunity to learn how to cook in the teaching kitchen and Maggie, our sessional cook, works very hard to deliver interesting and exciting sessions. Maggie is starting work with P6 pupils this week and the new block of family cooking has just started too. Gardening will be due to begin again after the Easter break with the sessional gardener. In addition to these sessions being simply good fun, there are a vast amount of learning opportunities involved. The curriculum is divided into 8 core aspects – literacy, numeracy, health and wellbeing, social studies, technology, science, expressive arts and RME. Within the cooking and gardening sessions pupils are always engaging in talking and listening, in addition to reading recipes and writing evaluations (literacy). Pupils are weighing and measuring (numeracy). Pupils are engaging in health and wellbeing by learning about food groups, growing and harvesting and healthy eating. Pupils are engaging in social studies, technology and science also by learning about cultural aspects of food/celebrations, understanding the science behind cooking and growing and using technology in the processes.
Play therapy – we work closely with Beverley from ‘With Kids’ who engages with individuals and groups in therapeutic interventions. This is to support and enhance self-esteem, confidence, understanding relationships and friendships. Beverley is also supporting transition preparation for some of our P7 pupils.
As you can see there is significant focus on pupil wellbeing in order to ensure our pupils come here to school ready to learn and engage. If they are struggling with aspects of mental and emotional health, their capacity to learn will reduce, which dictates the importance of focusing on wellbeing.
Parent Appointments
Continuing to work within the confines of COVID restrictions, we will again be offering telephone consultations for parents regarding pupil progress in place of ‘in person’ meetings. We would much prefer to meet you face to face but this is not allowed at present – we are ever hopeful that we can do this again soon!
Parent consultations will take place next week as follows:
Mr Thomson, Miss Johnstone and Miss Carmichael (P1, P3/2 and P4/3) will make their phone calls on Monday 28th February between 1 and 3pm.
Miss Bonner, Miss Kelly and Miss Fraser (P5/4, P6/5 and P7) will make their phone calls on Tuesday 1st March between 1 and 3pm.
Any parent that we know requires an interpreter will get a phone call between Tuesday 1st March and Thursday 3rd March from an interpreter who will ask questions as requested by school. These questions will allow you the opportunity to ask questions of us and share any concerns you have. We will follow these up when we receive your responses from interpreter services.
Please do ensure we have the correct phone numbers for you – if you have changed your number and not let us know yet, please contact us to have it updated on our system.
Please remember we are going to call and answer the phone if you possibly can. If you are unable to take a call on the set date, please contact us in advance and we can re-arrange. Teachers will attempt to call each parent up to 3 times during their consultation session.
Trips and Outings
Thank goodness we are in a position where we can start to think about getting the pupils out and about! We have the privilege of being a fairly small school and as such, we love to get our pupils out into the community and beyond to experience learning in a different and exciting environment.
P7 will be attending a ‘non-residential’ activity week beginning 21st March. We felt that a residential type of experience wasn’t the safest thing to do right now and were concerned that this could potentially be cancelled, leaving us with nothing. Our P7 pupils will be travelling to Luss each day Monday-Thursday during their week, and working with highly skilled and qualified instructors from ‘Adventure West’. They will engage in a variety of activities from paddle boarding to rock climbing and abseiling. The cost per pupil is almost £200 but this has been significantly reduced through funding and very generous anonymous donations! The cost per pupils is now £10. This can be paid at any time. More detail to follow.
P1-7 summer outings are being organised just now. We are looking into different options, transport providers and costings. More details to follow soon!
Transition
Transition activity for P7 pupils is on-going. The situation in Royston Primary is somewhat unique as almost all pupils opt to make placing requests away from the catchment secondary – Springburn Academy. This presents some challenge in that we cannot formally engage with the secondary school staff receiving until we know the outcome of the request made by parents – late April. However, we do invite secondary staff in from Smithycroft, Springburn and St Roch’s to visit and get to know our pupils. We have also been working very closely with SAMh who have been delivering transition sessions for our pupils. Our play therapist has been working with a small group of P7 pupils on some transition activities and pupils all have the opportunity to discuss their worries and ask questions to school staff.
We have a healthy list of new entrants for P1 and staff are beginning to arrange visits to nurseries to meet with our new pupils. In May we will have planned school visits for all new entrants – this may be on an individual basis our as a class group – this will depend on COVID restrictions nearer the time.
Rosemount Development Trust Bikes
We were very lucky to be included in the new cycle initiative facilitated by RDT. Any child who does not have a bike were being offered one! It sounds like there should be a catch – but there wasn’t! All pupils were asked if they had a working bicycle. If they did not have one, they were offered one. All bicycles offered were brand new and correctly sized to individual pupils. Pupils were also given helmets and information on cycle repair.
If you feel you missed out on that and your child does not have a working bicycle, please just get in touch – there are still bikes available.
Curriculum Rationale
We are looking at refreshing our curriculum rationale and updating our school values. Our current values have been in place for 5 years and they might be getting a bit stale! The curriculum rationale is simply a document which states how Royston Primary will deliver the curriculum as set by the government, in its’ own unique way and incorporating meaningful learning for the pupils of the Royston community. In order to progress with this, we need some help from our service users – yourselves and your children! We have started discussions and surveys with pupils and this will continue into term 4. Mrs Young who is leading this initiative is looking for some parents to be involved in supporting this. She is contacting parents at present to bring together a small focus group to consider different options and share their views. In addition, a parental survey has gone to everyone to seek views.
Social Media
We are becoming more aware of inappropriate use of social media for pupils across the school. The legal age to engage in snapchat, facebook, tiktok etc is 13yrs. Pupils are engaging in online intimidation, singing and dancing to completely inappropriate songs and being exposed to disturbing content. Pupils do not have any access to any of these things in school and therefore it is frustrating when significant amounts of time have to be taken up by my staff team on dealing with the aftermath of such activity. Please simply do not allow your child access these media platforms – supervised or not. There is a very important reason for there being an age restriction – the content is not suitable. This is a parental responsibility and we would be so grateful if you could consider this as a priority within your household.
LGBT awareness raising
In line with council priority we will be engaging in some awareness raising of aspects of LGBT. At present staff are gaining their training accreditations so as to ensure appropriate and sensitive management of this aspect. The awareness raising will be around demystifying some of the information that pupils have limited knowledge on and increasing their understanding about ‘everyone is different and unique’.
School Holiday Dates
School will close on Friday 1st April 2.30pm for Easter break. We will re-open on Tuesday 19th April.
School will be closed on Monday 2nd May for May day.
School will be closed on Thursday 5th May to pupils only for elections.
School will be closed on Friday 27th May for half term.
School will be closed Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd June for Queens Jubilee.
School will close for summer break on Friday 24th June 1pm. School will re-open for pupils on Wednesday 17th August.
Lots of dates to remember – just thought I would do a wee update!
Jane McShane
headteacher@royston-pri.glasgow.sch.uk
0141 552 2872
