Rose Hill Primary School

20th January 2023

How would you like to be involved?

Any new calendar year brings the excitement of new beginnings for everyone and no less in a workplace. The weather starts to lighten and curriculum planning anticipates getting back to much more outdoor provision and creative ways to guarantee pupil engagement throughout every class. Here in school we have exciting topics and trips planned for the children and school already feels very industrious, especially with our launch of our School Value Characters this week.

Now that we are able to welcome all of you back into the building, we can develop initiatives involving you more, since that element of school life had to be limited during the pandemic. We would like to gather your views this half term on how you would like this to look moving forward and a parental survey will be coming out shortly, to begin this piece of work.

Firstly, there are practical opportunities to be involved with the children in the school day. We have increasing numbers of you volunteering, which facilitates activities such as listening to readers, accompanying children to sporting events or helping out at forest school sessions. Quite simply, the more of you we have, the more ‘additional activities’ we can offer which require more intensive supervision, so if you might be able to offer some time, we would be thrilled to have you and ask that you contact your child’s class teacher.

Our Parent Teacher Association (PTA) is currently only small, but works tirelessly to generate an additional funding stream which can then provide opportunities or equipment for your children which schools would not normally be able to afford. These events can be within or outside of the school day, such as discos and the recent Christmas Market. Once again, the events they offer are dependent on the size of the PTA, so if you felt that you may be able to offer some time, even sporadically, please get in touch with them.

Secondly, there are opportunities to be involved in a different way, shaping Rose Hill’s strategic direction, vision and ethos. We have membership on our Governing Board which is made up of a range of roles from the community and Local Authority, one of which is as a parent governor. We have had parent/carer working parties, shaping aspects of curriculum eg our Sex and Relationships curriculum. We have held Parent Forums discussing one topic per month such as homework, attendance and behaviour, looking at aspects of school life where parental views can sometimes vary widely in our community. In order to try to raise children’s aspirations, we have invited parents/carers with specific skillsets from different professions to share their enthusiasm and knowledge with pupils, which have been very well received.

Please could we ask you to consider what you feel you could offer in your ‘wish list’ version of excellent parental engagement in a primary school. We appreciate everyone has different work or caring commitments, but we are an enormous school and if we could maximise different groups of parents/carers over time, we would still have current parent views. It will then be helpful to gather a group of parent/carers to decide which of the suggestions they think are most  appropriate to work together on. We will also be looking at all our communication platforms to see if these are still the best to use in sharing all the wonderful things going on at Rose Hill.  

Look forward to hearing form you in the survey.

Have a lovely weekend.

H.Mastrolonardo