WELCOME BACK, EVERYONE! I hope you all had a fantastic summer holiday and enjoyed the wonderful sunshine we were blessed with from beginning to end!

A very special welcome this morning to our new Primary 1’s! Our Primary 7 buddies are standing by to look after you today and I’m sure St Bartholomew’s will feel like home before you know it!

There have been several last-minute changes to our staffing for this session. Mrs Gillooly and Miss O’Brien have taken up posts in other establishments. They will both be greatly missed, but we wish them all the very best in their new schools. We welcome five new members of staff to St Bartholomew’s today. Mrs Deeney will be teaching Primary 3, Miss Hamill will be working with Primary 2 and Mrs McLean will be our Primary 5 teacher. Miss Cairns will also join the staff on a temporary basis, working in Primary 2 on a Friday and the Nursery on a Thursday morning. Our new Additional Support Needs Assistant is Mrs Davidson. I hope each and every one of you will feel very much at home here at St Bartholomew’s.

Contractors have been working in the school throughout the summer to replace the oil boilers with a new gas system. This job has proved more complicated than initially anticipated and the school will be without heating or hot water for the next few weeks. A letter providing full details of the situation will be sent out today, so please check your child’s school bag at 3 o’clock. School meals will continue to be prepared at St Patrick’s and will be served on disposable plates; this means there will be no disruption to the usual arrangements for hot lunches. Classrooms and toilets have been supplied with antibacterial gel for the washing of hands. I am confident the children will be unaffected by this delay to the new boilers… and we can all look forward to a new, efficient heating system in time for the winter months!

Many of you will have already read in the press about Mark Millar’s latest donation to St Bartholomew’s. Mark has raised the phenomenal sum of £3500 from his recent film ‘Wolverine’ and this has been earmarked for the school. We are still picking our jaws up off the floor after this huge surprise! I plan to speak to Mark over the next week or so to discuss how we will use the money to benefit our pupils. Mark, thank you so much for your friendship and your ongoing support of St Bartholomew’s – we must be the luckiest school in North Lanarkshire!

As we embark on another exciting year at St Bart’s, we ask God to bless all we do and ask Him for the grace to build an even stronger school community in which all of us can flourish and reach our full potential.

‘Ask the Lord to bless your plans, and you will be successful in carrying them out.’ (Proverbs 16:3)

Have a great first day in your new class, boys and girls!