Good afternoon everyone.

Wow. What an event our Y8 students put together last night. Every single 1 of them grafted throughout the day to put on a really professional Afternoon Tea event for their family and invited guests as a celebration of their learning for the expedition ‘Is Migration Worth the Risk?’

Students truly excelled in all areas, from catering for 150 people, creating wooden birds decorated in their own Islamic art, folding over 150 paper cranes, creating menus, seating plans, not to mention the artwork inspired by the poem that they then performed beautifully. If you can believe it, we also had Connor, Kenzie and Ryan MAKE the beautiful tired cake stands that were on every table. Every single student and a chance to shine over the past few weeks preparing for this celebration of learning and I am so proud of all of them for their hard work.

Students have had a number of great opportunities this term. They visited an art exhibition during refugee week where all of the art was created by migrants to express how they felt about the decision and the experience of migration. They have all had the chance to get in the kitchen and cook diverse foods. A group of students performed the poem Home by Warsan Shire (which you heard from the full cohort last night) at St Mary’s Heritage centre to a group of local delegates. Students also had the opportunity to volunteer their time at a local Saturday school and a group of our stewardship and gardening club students visited the local Comfrey project to do some activist learning through gardening!

It has been quite the term; it has been a pleasure working with the students on this expedition and I am so proud of all of them and would like to appreciate all of the staff, volunteers and experts who have supported the students this term. Finally to all of the parents. Your support is priceless when it comes to helping our students to grow into the people they want to be. Thank you.

Have a lovely restful summer break.

As a crew, we would like to thank all the players who signed up to play in the tournament for making it such a good atmosphere yesterday.

We would also like to thank all the parents and students spectators who, despite the rain, came along to support us with the event.

We would also like to give a big appreciation to the staff who gave up their time to support the event, as well as Pamela who came to supervise the BBQ. As well as this, we must give a special mention to Ethan, Gemma, Bella, Charlie, Elina, Katie N and Evie who all stepped up with helping throughout the event, despite only coming as spectators (and for Bella stepping in to play at the last minute so her crew could field a team!)

Huge congratulations to Crew Parks for the last minute screamer from Danny against Crew Parks to win the game.

And congratulations to Crew Nightingale as well for winning the Y7 and 8 tournament in the final against Crew King.

Due to the generosity of the supporters, we have managed to raise £272.75 for Tiny Lives!

I have posted about this previously but wanted to piggy back yesterday’s generosity… The entirety of Crew Stanton are signed up to do the Junior Great North Run and my wife and I are also doing the main Great North Run in September all for Tiny Lives. We have a shared Just Giving page for all of us here, so if you can, we would love your sponsorship. We’d also be very appreciative if you could share the just giving link with family and fiends and through your own social media pages.

Thanks for all of the support you have offered our events this year, we look forward to continuing with our events next year!

Crew Stanton

Scarlett and Hallie recently  played in the Darlington all stars summer football tournament today and their team, Cleveland Hall U13 girls, finished in second place. An amazing achievement for the team.

Fantastic effort girls, well done!

We would love to be able to upgrade our library space, which is integral to our reading strategy and promoting a love of reading with our students. Students are engaging really well with reading and we would like to make the space more inviting, invest in a proper library monitoring system and invest in a wider range of books. Our library is completely student led and run during social times and the student librarians would really appreciate your support.

One thing we’ve tried to do is use the library space to provide students with recommendations to delve deeper into their expeditions by reading associated texts. This idea of having themed displays and recommendations is something we’d love to develop further.

The National Book Token programme are taking nominations for schools to win a grant to invest in their libraries (scroll down on the website to place your nomination). We are asking all families, students and friends of the school to please nominate XP Gateshead for this prize.

Thanks for your support,

Miss Tatters and the XPG student librarians

The weather forecast is suggesting that we will have showers, please remind students to bring a waterproof coat.

Reminder that class 2 students are due to return to school at 3.30pm.

Northumbria Police have shared the following update with us about messaging sent out last week on their behalf:

On Friday, March 22, communication was shared about a report of a group on a social media messaging app containing inappropriate content aimed at young people.

Although this messaging was shared in good faith, some of the details had at that point not been verified.

We would therefore ask you to please not reference this, including on social media.

As always, we would also ask that you continue to take an interest in your children’s use of social media and if you do have concerns that you report these to the police.

Officers take matters such as this extremely seriously and are investigating the report of the social media group.

Please note that we break up for half term on Friday 16th February. We return to school on Monday 26th February.

We have another week in school next week.

Please make sure that you refer to the relevant Gateshead-based calendar on our website 2023/24 Calendar.