New information snapshots

By Julie Mosley25th April 2023

This week, students be shown their new updated snapshots with attendance, HoWL and academic information. These will be shared with you at home soon.

Before we share these with you at home and in advance of SLCs (Student-Led Conferences), students will look at this information and make new pledges which will also be shared with you. This is an important part of students being leaders of their own learning. Students will then show evidence of their work towards these pledges in their next SLCs.

We will have more information on the next set of SLCs in due course. These will take place in the fortnight commencing 19th June.

XPG Year 6 Transition – Calendar of events 2023

By Martin Said24th April 2023

Dear Year 6 Families

We are delighted to be able to announce the calendar of transition events that we have planned to welcome your children and your family into our community at XP Gateshead.

More details on each of these events will follow in due course, but here is an overview of the activities so that you can plan ahead and discuss this with your child.

Online Family Meetings

This week we will send details of how to sign up for an online family meeting. Meetings will be in the fortnight commencing 15th May. These take place via Google Meet during the evening and are with a senior leader in the school. The meetings are a first chance for us to meet you and your child, to find out about them and discuss our expectations as a school. Your meeting will last up to 30 minutes.

Primary School Visits

We aim to visit every child in their Primary School starting from the week commencing 22nd May. This is done by members of our transition team and means that as well as seeing your child in an educational setting, they get to know another friendly face before they come to us.

In-Person Information Evening for parents/carers

We will be holding an In-Person Information Evening at our school on 7th June at 6pm.

It is important that all families attend as we will give important information about the Outward Bound course that takes place for all students at the start of Year 7 as well as our iPad scheme. In addition, we will address some of the misconceptions about our school so that families are completely clear on what we are: ‘A mainstream school with a relentless focus on beautiful work, character growth and academic success’, and also what we are not. There will be an opportunity for you to ask us questions too of course.

Due to the size of our temporary accommodation, we ask where possible that a maximum of two people from each family attend this event.

Transition Days at XP Gateshead

Your children will join us in school on Tuesday 4th July and Wednesday 5th July. Again more details of these days will follow in due course. Like a regular school day, students can arrive in school from 8:00am but need to be present by 8:25am. Our school day finishes at 3:15pm.

Your child will follow a typical day at XPG on both days which include some crew sessions, expedition sessions and a community meeting.

Meet your child’s Crew Leader

Following the transition days, on Thursday 6th July we will invite parents and carers into school in the evening to meet your child’s new Crew Leader. We expect all families to attend this event. We are proud of the strong relationships that we form with families at XP Gateshead and this is an important opportunity for you to begin to build that relationship with the person that will be the key adult for your child when they start with us. As well as our cross-curricular learning expeditions, our pastoral structure Crew is what sets us apart from other schools.

Information Gathering

A huge thanks to all of those families that have completed the Google Form to let us know about you and your child. We will also gather information from Primary Schools over the coming term so that we build a clear picture of your child and how we can support and challenge them to be the best version of themselves and see success.

 

In summary:

Beautiful work in French Arts and Crafts

By Emily Quested24th April 2023

In our lunchtime club: ‘French Arts and Crafts; the students have gone through the alphabet in French and made salt dough figurines for something that begins with each letter.

Through A to Z they created animals, items of furniture, places and things. Then, with the help of an online dictionary and Señorita/ Mademoiselle Quested they have written facts about each thing in French.

The students have painted each with acrylic and have displayed them to present their beautiful work! Très bon travail!

Crew Parks – Crew Day: Trees for cities

By Tom Devitt24th April 2023

For our first Crew Day in Year 8 following the establishment of our Crew charity, we took the morning to gain further knowledge of our charity – Trees For Cities! Our vision is to create a notice board that will inform other Crews in our School of what our charity does and raise awareness of the importance of trees in urban spaces, connecting this to what we have learned about trees in biology.

In the afternoon, we walked together to ‘The Fortress’ in Windy Nook, where we had a picnic to which each crew member had contributed. When returning to school we took a longer walk back through the nature reserve which made us appreciate how important our environment is to us, and the positive impact that trees can have in urban environments. 

As a crew, we are really eager to learn more about ‘Trees for Cities’, and we cannot wait to contribute further to our community!