Year 11 must be feeling poetry fatigue at this point in the term. They have ploughed through seven weeks of finishing the poetry anthology and still have another week to go.
They are approaching every session with a positive mental attitude and are working hard to ensure they have plenty of detailed annotations to revise from. The quality of your work and the effort you are putting into session is fantastic and shows how much you care about your GCSEs.
Well done!
Keep up this fantastic work guys. I know it is a slog but it will be worth it I promise!
Important Safeguarding Notice: Children’s “Spy” Books
We want to make you aware of a recent issue affecting some popular children’s books by Andrew Cope, including the Spy Dogs, Spy Cats, and Spy Pups series.
Some editions of these books include a printed web address at the back. This link used to go to the author’s website, but the domain is no longer under his control. It has since been taken over by another party and now leads to inappropriate adult content.
The publisher, Puffin, has paused sales and distribution of the books and is working with schools, libraries, and retailers to remove copies from circulation. They have stressed that the website has no connection to the author or publisher.
What this means for you:
If your child has any Spy Dog, Spy Cat or Spy Pups books at home, please check the back for website links and make sure they do not try to visit the site.
It is safe for children to continue reading the stories themselves — the concern is only with the outdated link.
We recommend talking with your child about the importance of not following web addresses in books without checking with an adult first.
We will continue to share updates from the publisher as more information becomes available.
Beautiful work and amazing products are an integral part of our story at XP but equally important are the ways that we achieve that work and those products.
Our students are encouraged to draft and redraft, to refine their ideas, to not accept work that isn’t excellent. In the Arts team this year we’ve seen exactly that with students starting new courses and new expeditions and being given new opportunities to excel.
None of the pictures above show finished products, instead we can see the beauty of the creative process. For some that means painstakingly drafting and redrafting photoreal images using only pencils. For others it may be that a session sharing ideas on the whiteboard is the best way to make progress. Creating models and maquettes in a range of materials can be the catalyst that a student needs to make their creative vision into a beautiful final product. What looks at first glance to be a random collection of scraps can be actually a carefully curated abstract vision. A messy workbench will finally reveal a beautiful relief sculpture.
We celebrate our students creative work not only for the final curation but for the whole process of exploration, experimentation, and growth that leads them there — the ideas tried, the risks taken, and the skills developed along the way.
Last week our Y7’s/8s have continued receiving coaching from Club Doncaster and Doncaster knights rugby, which has seen students engaging with the wider community and developing further opportunities outside of school. This week is as follows:
Wednesday – Boys football practice/netball practice. 3.30-4.30
Thursday – Cheerleading practice and girls football practice. 3.30-4.30
We are currently working hard behind the scenes to finalise and approve all student awards on the eDofE system. This process takes time as each section is carefully checked and verified to ensure students receive the recognition they deserve.
Once this is complete, we will share further details about our upcoming Celebration Event, where students’ hard work and achievements will be formally recognised.
Thank you for your patience and continued support, we’re looking forward to celebrating together. This is likely to be after half term.
Every Thursday morning, part of Crew time is spent on independent revision tasks in preparation for the Mocks to come in November. It’s brilliant to see Crew so focused on this!
During pick up time at XP today, you may have noticed an increased police presence at the front of school and in car park 3.
Attempts have been made this afternoon to take bikes from our site. As such, we requested police presence at the end of the day to support us. No bikes were taken today – but as a reminder, students should ensure they’re bringing a D-lock for their bikes and use the racks at the front of XP.
Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust!
To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.
G29: What makes a great education?
Last term, students in G29 at XPG were challenged to give a keynote at the MTEM conference on what makes a great education. Over a week they drafted and put together an incredible speech which they have now recorded back in school.
A few students in Crew Nightingale are in the Higher Maths class; they have been developing their understanding of trigonometry through SOH, CAH, TOA, learning how to calculate missing sides and angles in right-angled triangles. They have also been focusing on changing the subject of a formula, an important algebraic skill that will support their success across many areas of maths and science. These topics encourage careful reasoning and step-by-step working, and it has been fantastic to see students building confidence and accuracy as they tackle increasingly challenging problems.
