Dear Families

We achieved so much last week with Transition Days, Fieldwork, Experts working in school, Educator Led Conferences and our DofE bronze final expedition. Community meetings on Friday were a real joy, both in school with G30, G29 and out in the field with G28. To hear staff and students talk with genuine care for each other, our culture and the school we are building together is unique. As you know we are a small staff at XPG (19 in total including several part time staff) and the quality curriculum and extra-curricular activities that we offer our students to support and challenge them to produce beautiful work, grow in character and see academic success is down to the hard work and commitment of our staff. Crew is as important to staff as it is to students and I feel grateful and privileged to be part of such a great staff crew. Huge thanks go out to all staff this week for their continued care and support of every student at XPG.

G31 Transition Days

We finally got to meet our new cohort of students last week and G31 got to know each other on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week. Transition Days were a huge success and it was great to see new friendships form, confidence grow and smiles on the faces of our new students. G31 enjoyed two full days in school which included crew along with sessions in Spanish, PE, Art, Human, Science and Maths. At the end of each day it was great to circle up for community meetings with all 50 students and hear their appreciations to each other and their answers to the guiding question we had set for transition days ‘What will it take for me to be the best version of myself at XP Gateshead?’

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The work of student leaders across transition days was exceptional from supporting sessions and end of day community circle  to running clubs at break and lunch time. The vast array of student-led social time sessions is a testament to our students and the warm welcome they gave to our new year group – board games, mindful arts, rounders, basketball, dance, book club, choir, music, robotics, arts and crafts, football.

G30 Fieldwork working with Durham University Biosciences Department

On Thursday, G30 enjoyed an amazing day at Durham University to further study aquatic food chains as part of their current expedition, “How does water shape our world?” Our students worked alongside scientists in the lab using microscopes to look at a variety of species and then also identified species  from the nearby pond. One of the many highlights of the day for G30 students was observing a leech give birth, a moment Caleb and others will never forget and one many of us will never be lucky enough to see!

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For Year 7, this was their first visit to a University Campus (with more to come) which was a really important moment for our students. As you know, university-readiness is part of our mission at XP Gateshead, to ensure that our students are on a path to university if that is what they choose for their future. Special thanks to Miss Jamison who organised this fieldwork opportunity for our students.

G29 Crew King and Crew Watson working in the kitchen 

As part of the preparation for their presentation of learning on 17th July, Crew King and Crew Watson worked in the kitchen last  week to prepare dishes from around the world for the event.

Crew King prepared samosas and spring rolls and Crew Watson prepared Lamington’s from Australian and Nigerian meat pies. Mrs Tatters, our expert who supported students was again blown away by the quality of work shown, some of which was of “shop-bought standard”.

This week, more Crews in G29 will take to the kitchen to prepare their dishes for the Celebration of Learning event where our students will be hosting and catering an evening to celebrate their learning through their expedition ‘Is Migration Worth the Risk?’. This celebration of learning will be held at XP Gateshead School on 17th July 2024. More information to come.

G29 Expert – Eira Hegarty

On Friday our G29 students met Eira Hegarty, a final year medical student who has spent time volunteering for Refugee Community Kitchen in Calais. This was a great opportunity for our students to get first-hand information about the scale and level of challenge around what is a very complex and emotive issue of our time. As always, our students were prepared with great questions. The session was really insightful and important to students’ current expedition, and will further help students to determine for themselves ‘Is Migration Worth the Risk?’.

G28 Assessed Duke of Edinburgh Expedition 

On Friday our G28 Pioneers embarked on their final assessed Duke of Edinburgh expedition. As you know, DofE (like our Year 7 Ullswater Outward Bound experience) is an important aspect of our curriculum in challenging students to develop their character and push them beyond their comfort zone and I’m delighted to say that G28 smashed it! 

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Students covered a huge distance of over 20 km across country, whilst being supervised remotely. All students that took part have now successfully completed the assessed expedition section of their award, and all that remains before they can be signed off to be awarded bronze is to complete the de-gunge in school tomorrow morning.

There were many highlights from across the two days. Seeing students support each other and battle through pain and the challenge of such distance with a significant amount of kit on their back reminds us of how important the Duke of Edinburgh scheme is – not just in terms of the accreditation of the bronze award but most importantly in showing students that there is more in them than they know, and that tackling challenges as a Crew is always more successful. We had a beautiful community meeting on Friday evening where the midges were able to listen to wonderful praises for character – our students really do notice each other’s brilliance.

Thank you to all staff who have supported our G28 students to successfully complete their bronze DofE qualification and the time they have invested in this (inside and outside of school hours) – Miss Tatters, Miss Jones, Miss Marshall, Mr Walters, Mr Mead, Mr Said, Mrs Dobson. A special thanks and congratulations to Mr Devitt for his leadership of our first DofE at XP Gateshead.

Educator Led Conferences

Think Student Led Conferences and then think SLCs for adults and that’s an Educator Led Conference (ELC). As you know, at XPG ‘if its good enough for our students, it’s good enough for the adults’. This starts with induction and an outward bound experience for staff looking at the importance of crew and then each year, every member of staff shares their learning to an audience of their peers as part of our professional engagement process. So far we have enjoyed ELCs from Mr Said, Miss Jamison, Mrs Donlan, Mrs Diamond, Mr Mead, Miss Jones, Mrs Ross and we are really looking forward to this week’s ELCs which include our new staff, Miss Simpson and Mr Azam who move towards the end of their induction.

This week

PE sessions this week

Our PE sessions this week are as follows. Please ensure that your child has their full PE kit.

• G30 students (Y7) have PE on Monday this week
• G29 students (Y8) 
  • 8-1 have PE on Tuesday this week
  • 8-2 have PE on Wednesday this week
• G28 students (Y9) have PE on Friday this week 

Crew day – XPG Sports Day, Thursday 11th July

This week we have our final Crew Day of the year. As is always the case, this day will be about building crew but this time, the theme is sport and physical challenge.

Sports Day will involve a range of activities with healthy competition within each cohort between Crews. Students should come dressed in PE kit for the day. A reminder of PE kit can found by clicking here.

As part of their day G28 students will build on their excellence from DofE last week and do one last major physical exertion this year – because there is more in them than they know. As well as their sporting activities in the afternoon, the morning will be spent carrying out a walk for water, sharing the load between their Crew to complete 6km as a Crew

Our partners for this challenge are the Comfrey Project in Gateshead, who have supported us with our migration expedition in Year 8 for the last couple of years – the funds raised through the website timetohelp.org.uk will be passed to the organisation Walk for Water.

For each £2700 raised for the charity, a toilet block can be installed in a rural area of Africa. We realise G28 parents have supported crew charities a lot throughout year 9, please only give what you can. Anything we raise will be helpful in contributing towards installing important sanitation in a place of need.

On average, women and girls in developing countries walk 6 kilometres (approximately 3.5 miles) a day, carrying 20 litres (about 42 pounds/20 kgs) of water. It is common for this journey to take more than 15 hours a week in some areas. We want to build empathy in our students for people who don’t have access to clean water, and help them to understand the hardship that some people face just to be able to drink, clean and cook every day.

We hope you will support by clicking on this link to donate!

G31 Transition – Meet the Crew Leader, Tuesday 9th July 5pm

Our ‘Meet the Crew Leader’ will be hosted in school. This is an important opportunity for families to meet their child’s Crew Leader and begin forming the strong relationship that will be needed to support and challenge your child to become the best version of themselves. This event is for adults from families only, you should not bring your child to this event.

This event will start at 5pm on Tuesday evening and is expected to last for around 45 minutes.

XP Trust Festival of Culture and Arts

Our choir, dancers and rock school students will be travelling down to Doncaster on Friday to be part of the inaugural festival. They will be performing in a line up that includes performers from across all of our schools in the trust. Our students will perform twice throughout the day, once for an audience of our primary school children, and again later in the day for a wider audience of families and our older children from the secondary schools on Doncaster.

This is the first festival of its kind in the trust, and in future years we intend to expand the scale of the festival to include performances that will take place on our school site.

Good luck to our performers this week!

Extended Study and Clubs

Extended study and after school clubs will not be running this week due to staff Educator Led Conferences and Transition event ‘Meet your Crew Leader’. 

Extended study and after school clubs will not be running next week due to Presentations of Learning. 

Dress code

As you know, our dress code asks students and staff to:

Please dress appropriately and modestly.

I ask for your support again around dress code, especially in the warmer weather where a minority of students are not getting it right in terms of modesty and wearing clothes that are revealing.  While we understand that students prefer to wear shorts in the nicer weather of the Summer Term, it is important that these remain modest and not reveal the upper thigh. Shorts for both girls and boys should reach at least mid-thigh without having to be constantly pulled down. Additionally, cropped tops and vest tops that reveal the chest or midriff are not appropriate for school.

Thank you as always for your ongoing support. 

As usual if you have any questions please contact your child’s crew leader in the first instance. 

Julie Mosley

Dear Families

Sometimes, when you look back on the week past it is hard to believe that so much can be achieved in a week and this is definitely the case for last week when we only had four days with our students!

We get the chance to see your children and their greatness every day and see how hard they are working to produce beautiful work, grow their character and be successful academically. We also get the chance to see and hear them challenging and supporting each other to be better and, like staff here, our students ‘sweat the small stuff’ and have high expectations of themselves and their peers.  This is not the norm in schools and I feel really proud of our school where staff and students work together building this culture, doing this as crew and not passengers.

G28 Fieldwork 

As part of their current expedition, ‘Hold Back the River’ our Year 9 students had an amazing fieldwork experience at the coast this week, studying the river at Seaton Burn and the Seaton Sluice coastline.  The fieldwork incorporated geography standards around map reading, fieldwork skills including data collection and analysis and also physical geography standards about river processes, giving students an opportunity to test a hypothesis about the long profile of a river, and the changes from the middle to the lower course. In addition students spent time on a solo, using their surroundings to help prepare them for writing standards in English language associated with poetry and connected to the literature pieces that they have been studying. Finally, they also spent time observing the dune ecosystems at Seaton Sluice, building on learning about biotic and factors and variation in biology, to look at the adaptations, abundance and distribution of species that thrive in the dunes.

G30 Fieldwork

Our Year 7 students carried out fieldwork along the River Tyne this week as part of their current expedition and guiding question ‘How does water shape our world?’

They packed so much into one day, including using the physical model of the river catchment at Newcastle Central Library to look at how features can affect the river catchment and flow of water, using their sharp vocabulary to discuss how changes to the landscape impact on the whole system. They also walked the length of the Tyne from the quayside to Felling Shore to study human geography standards, looking at the change in land use on both sides of the river along the section sampled.

G29 workshop – Climate Adaptability

Year 8 students continue to consider their guiding question,  ‘Is Migration worth the Risk?’,  as part of their current expedition, ‘Should I stay or should I go?.’ Last week they spent time with expert Gemma Sarigu from ‘Students Owning Sustainability’. The session fit into the wider expedition, where students are seeing how changes in climate are becoming an increasingly prevalent push factor which causes people to migrate. Protecting our planet is one of our curricular seams that runs throughout expeditions, and this session was important in addressing potential feelings of ‘climate anxiety’. Much of the session was spent considering opportunities that climate change poses in terms of developing technologies, careers and bringing people together.

G30 Art Workshops

Our final workshops with Bruce Tuckey for art students leaders took place this week. This involved students creating sculptures inspired by the works on the Tyne Riverside Sculpture Park. We will post images of the final products soon.

PE collaboration with Felling Cricket Club 

This week our Year 9 students enjoyed the chance to test their cricket skills at Felling Cricket Club. We are really lucky to have such facilities on our doorstep, allowing our students to experience expert facilities and give them a platform to play cricket locally outside of school. All year groups will be using this facility in the coming weeks and months. Special thanks to Mr Devitt, Danny Norman and Macolm Norman who have supported this collaboration.

This week

Like was said on our early look ahead last week, it’s another packed week!

G31 Year 6 Transition Days – Tuesday 2nd and Wednesday 3rd July

This week we meet our new G31 students for their transition days at XP Gateshead. We are really looking forward to getting to know our G31 cohort and for them to get to know each other. Please see the website post for full details on transition. 

Please note that for all students (including Year 6 students), our school day will start at the usual time of 8:25am each day with students able to arrive from 8:00am. Each day will end at 3:15am for all students (there are no clubs or extended study running on Tuesday or Wednesday).

G29 Crews working in the kitchen – Wednesday 3rd and Thursday 4th July

As part of the preparation for their presentation of learning on 17th July, this week Crew King and Crew Watson will be working in the kitchen this week to prepare dishes from around the world for the event.

• Crew King – Wednesday 3rd July, 
• Crew Watson – Thursday 4th July

The ingredients will be already sourced for students. In terms of safety, long hair must be tied back, and students should wear clothes that are OK to get dirty. 

Over the next week, each of our G29 Crews will be working in the kitchen to prepare dishes for the presentation of learning event where our students will be hosting and catering an evening to celebrate their learning through their expedition ‘Is Migration Worth the Risk?’ This celebration of learning will be held at XP Gateshead School on 17th July 2024.

G28 Duke of Edinburgh Kit Check – Wednesday 3rd July, 3:30pm

Students in G28 will carry out a full kit check in school in readiness for their assessed expedition which is taking place on Friday and Saturday this week. The kit check should take no more than 1 hour and students will contact families to let you know when they will be finished if they need a lift home from school.

G30 Fieldwork – Thursday 4th July

On Thursday, G30 will be carrying out an important fieldwork at the Durham University Biosciences Department to further study aquatic food chains – both under the microscope and by looking at the variety of species caught from the nearby pond. For Year 7, this will be their first visit to a University Campus which is a really important moment for our students. As you know, university-readiness is part of our mission at XP Gateshead, to ensure that our students are on a path to university if that is what they choose for their future.

Students should arrive at the regular time and will finish school at 3.15pm as normal. They will need their regular kit for the day, a packed lunch and will need to be prepared for the weather (the current forecast is mild, sunny spells with a chance of showers). Students that normally have a free school meal will be provided with a packed lunch.

G28 Assessed Duke of Edinburgh Expedition – Friday 5th and Saturday 6th July

This week our G28 Pioneers embark on their final assessed Duke of Edinburgh expedition. As you know, DofE (like Year 7 Ullswater Outward Bound) is an important aspect of our curriculum in challenging students to develop their character and push them beyond their comfort zone. As a school we invest a great deal of time, money and staff resources into helping all students to achieve the award. We expect all of our students to complete the DofE.

Students should arrive at regular time on Friday and will be transported to their Duke of Edinburgh drop off point in Wark, Northumberland. Students will then be staying at Greencarts Campsite, next to Hadrian’s Wall, before completing day two of the expedition and being collected in Acomb, Northumberland. Students can expect to arrive back to school in the late afternoon on Saturday the 6th May.

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The forecast is mild, sunny spells and showers. The kit list reflects these possibilities, please ensure that your child is equipped for sun, rain and changes in temperature.

PE sessions this week

Our PE sessions this week are as follows. Please ensure that your child has their full PE kit.

• G30 students (Y7) have PE on Monday this week
• G29 students (Y8) have PE on Wednesday this week
• G28 students (Y9) have PE on Thursday this week 

Extended Study and Clubs

Extended study and after school clubs will not be running this week due to transition, DofE preparation and staff Educator Led Conferences (think SLCs for adults – what’s good for our children is good for us!). 

Punctuality

Can I remind all families about the importance of good punctuality. A calm start to each day is really important for students to settle into learning and as you know, we ask all parents and carers to support their children with this, it is part of the XP Home School Agreement that every family has signed.

We are starting to see a small minority of students arrive after 8:25am without real justification. Please note that school opens at 8:00am every morning and there are spaces available for socialising, reading or completing extended study. Students must be on site for 8.25am for the call to Crew. 

Students have been given clear reminders about punctuality and I know that Crew Leaders have been in contact with families to remove barriers around punctuality. We monitor lateness closely down to precise time lost and where punctuality issues continue, students will make up lost time at the end of the week. 

Thank you as always for your ongoing support. 

As usual if you have any questions please contact your child’s crew leader in the first instance. 

Julie Mosley