Principal's Welcome Back Message - 2024/2025

Dear Parents/Carers,

Welcome back to all existing parents and a warm welcome to all new parents.

This weekly newsletter serves as a means to keep you informed and updated on the latest happenings at Highams Park School, while also fostering a strong connection between home and school. It is distributed every Friday afternoon, and we kindly ask that you take the time to read it as we may also use it to communicate important messages.

We also have a WhatsApp Channel as an additional means of communicating with parents and students.

WhatsApp Channel is a relatively new feature in WhatsApp introduced last year and it allows one-way communication from organisations – it is not possible to ‘reply’ to a message. We will use this for conveying short-term key information, such as dismissal times on the last day of term, for example.

As we embark on the 24/25 academic year, we are pleased to report that we are starting from a position of strength. While OFSTED overall effectiveness grades have been discontinued, we concluded last term with a positive visit resulting in an overall good grading for overall effectiveness and an outstanding rating for our sixth form. We are proud to share that we have achieved the highest staff retention rate in quite some time and have received noticeably improved GCSE results and exceptional A-level results over the summer.

A special congratulations to our year 11 students for their hard work and dedication, which has led to these excellent results, and we are delighted to welcome many of our year 11 students from last year into the sixth form, as well as students from other local schools joining our Sixth Form this week.

For the eighth consecutive year, our A-level results have been outstanding, positioning us in the top 25% nationally for student progress at Key Stage 5.  A huge congratulations to our outgoing Year 13 students as well, the vast majority of whom started with us as Year 7 students in the 2017/18 academic year, and have now completed their 7 year Highams Park journey. 

This year our focus will be on enhancing the quality of teaching and learning within our school. Mainly focusing on checking for understanding during lessons and teachers ensuring errors and misconceptions are addressed before moving on.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to kindly remind parents to ensure that their children adhere to the Highams Park Uniform Policy, which is linked for your reference. Our school has a zero-tolerance policy regarding uniform and it is mandatory for every student to attend school wearing the appropriate attire.

We appreciate your ongoing support and for choosing Highams Park.

Mr N Armsby - Principal