Friday 11th April 2025
Dear Parents and Carers,
In this, the final week of the Spring Term, we have been focusing on Holy Week. Our journey to Easter this year has been supported by a series of paintings on the Passion of Christ by the Ethiopian artist, Nebiyu Assefa. His work was chosen for our reflections as it can be considered ‘child-like’ in nature and this seemed apt, given the Bishop’s Lent Call focused on children this year. Each day the children explored a different painting, illustrating a scene from the Easter story. After sharing the related bible extract, the children reflected on the image and the message it shared before producing their own art work in response. Your child has brought home a Holy Week Family Sheet which includes some of the paintings should you wish to use them in your reflections during Holy Week next week.
On Thursday, Father Mark led us in a Holy Week Mass where we heard readings leading up to Good Friday and Jesus’ death. When we return to school after the break, we will celebrate the good news of the Easter weekend and Jesus’ resurrection together, here in school.
In other news, this week we held our annual Easter Bonnet Parade – the creations were truly wonderful and it was so, so hard to choose winners from them all. And, as those of you who were there will know, I opted to choose not one, but two children from each phase in recognition of the efforts made – here are the winners:
| EYFS | Key Stage One | Lower Key Stage Two | Upper Key Stage Two |
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A big well done to Mark too, for being the only child in his class to take part.
We also enjoyed the last of our fundraising events for the Bishop’s Lent Call – Year Four’s games afternoon.
| EYFS | £57.81 |
| Year One | £48.85 |
| Year Two | £37.00 |
| Year Three | £73.00 |
| Year Four | £14.00 |
| Year Five | £23.50 |
| Year Six | £33.20 |
I know that the children had great fun coming up with their fundraising ideas and that they enjoyed taking part. We have tallied up the amount of money collected at each event, and the table show how much each class has raised. All of the money will be combined, and will be used to help support children who have experienced trauma in Zimbabwe, Jeruselem and closer to home, here in the Diocese of Southwark. Thank you for supporting the events; your contribution, no matter how big or small, will make a real difference to the lives of children in need.
Below is a summary of the learning that has taken place across the school this week.
| Early Years | ||
| Early Years have really enjoyed exploring the Ethiopian artist Nebiju Assefa’s work this week as part of our Holy Week learning. We created our own table and portraits in response to the painting of ‘The Last Supper’, explored how different colours represent emotion when reflecting on ‘The Garden of Gethsemane’ and used handprints to make cockerels in response to ‘The Lie’.
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| Year One | ||
| We have had a fun-filled week in Year One! Each day we have been reflecting, through art on the events of Holy Week. We have been making models, creating abstract art, using finger prints, making paper chains and making Easter Gardens to symbolise each event. We also really enjoyed practicing hymns and attending Easter mass. | ||
| Year Two | ||
| This week Year Two have been studying the paintings of Nebiyu Assefa. Through Assefa’s artwork the children have reflected upon the key events of Holy Week. During the week, Year Two used a variety of resources to recreate key elements of Assefa’s paintings. In Maths, Year Two has continued learning about multiplication and division. The children practised using arrays and blank number lines to solve multiplication and division problems. | ||
| Year Three | Year Four | |
| This week, Year Three created a work of art each day to reflect on the events of Holy Week. We covered drawing, watercolours, collage and model-making as we considered the sacrifice that Jesus made for humanity. This was a lovely way to prepare for mass on Thursday, and it brought together the learning that we have been doing this half term on Holy Communion. In maths, we continued to explore the metric system by converting and comparing different masses in grams and kilograms. In English, we wrote kennings – a sort of riddle-poem – then read them out to each other to see if we could guess the animal that the poet had been describing. | This week in Year Four we have been exploring in further detail the Easter story, and the children enjoyed showing all what they know about this time of the year and enhancing their knowledge. We have also continued learning about division and decimals in maths, doing a great job, as well as finishing our watercolour art project related to the Amazon rainforest. | |
| Year Five | ||
| The children have shown great reflection and artistic flare in our Holy Week learning. They have thoughtfully discussed the artist’s choices of colour and how to portray scenes of the Passion of Christ, and they have created art with pastels, contrasting colours to create silhouette scenes, constructed cockerels and crosses. A wonderful week to end the term, well done. | ||
| Year Six | ||
| This week in Year Six we have greatly enjoyed putting together, preparing for and performing our class assembly. There is so much that we wanted to share with you all, we hope that everyone was able to take away at least one piece of new learning as well as great enjoyment! As part of our learning on Holy Week, we really enjoyed creating images of the Last Supper, focusing on shiloettes and negative spaces, and we were inspired by the use of colour in the paintings shared. As we get ready for our upcoming SATs, we are all looking forward to Eatser School where we can focus on developing out test taking skills! | ||
Head Teacher awards were presented to the following children in this week’s celebration assembly.
| EYFS | Aaleyah for great listening during carpet sessions. Aaleyah has been very diligent when doing her work and has been doing a great job of putting her hand up. Well done Aaleyah.
Za’Raiyah for working really hard. She has been practicing writing her name and all of her hard work is starting to pay off! Well done Za’Raiyah! |
| Year One | Jah’Sonya for creating a lovely self portrait inspired by the pop art of Andy Warhol and for bravely learning the lines of her absent classmates to perform in our class assembly.
Luqman for always thinking and caring for others in the class, Luqman is very good at helping his classmates when they are feeling shy, lost or confused |
| Year Two | Damian for his use of shades and tints to recreate Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Benjamin for independent writing using conjunctions to extend his sentences. |
| Year Three | Sodiq for working to create beautifully structured sentences in his written work.
Teni for applying her science and connected curriculum vocabulary to new topics. |
| Year Four | Ysys for participating more actively during the lessons and showing effort during your independent work.
Faith for being ready to help others, showing enthusiasm during lessons and trying to focus to get the most from them. |
| Year Five | Tiniyah for writing an excellent diary entry. She used her plan, edited well adding interesting adjectives to improve her work and made an extra effort with her handwriting in her last paragraph.
Mason for excellent effort in his learning. He has been working more independently and is always ready to start work. He has also been a real help around the classroom. |
| Year Six | Sophia for her improved efforts with her writing and her punctuality – she is getting better at both – and for great partner work with Tiwa!
Tiwa for great partner work with Sophia in RE, they focused and got on with the task set, working well together. |
The house point totals for this week are:
| GARRISON | 46 | AUGUSTINE | 65 |
| FRANKLIN | 36 | DICKENS | 62 |
Attached to this letter you will find an update from our Chair of Governors, Peter Truesdale, on our Save the School Campaign. If you have any questions about the content, do please ask.
On a final note, I wish you all a Happy and Hopefilled Easter. We look forward to welcoming you all back to school on Tuesday 22nd April 2025.
Kind regards
Mrs Warland
Head Teacher
Friday 11th April 2025
Dear Parents,
Thank you for sticking with us! We are grateful for the confidence you have shown in the school. This reflects the great pride the school has in our young scholars and the way in which they grow in learning and responsibility.
As you know, we have made the decision to refer Lambeth’s proposed closure of our school to the Schools Adjudicator. To be clear, the decision about whether or not our school should be closed now lies entirely with the Adjudicator, not Lambeth Council.
The Adjudicator is very thorough. We have shared with the Adjudicator significant volumes of material. Not the least important of these is what you and your children told us, and told Lambeth, about what you thought of the proposal to close our school.
The Adjudicator has carefully considered what we said and he has asked relevant questions of all the parties concerned. All these have now submitted their answers. So, we are now waiting for the Adjudicator to set out a timetable as to how and when he will make the legally binding decision.
We hope that we will hear from the Adjudicator in the coming weeks and so I would like to invite you to meet with me at school at either 9:00am or 3:30 on Wednesday 30th April 2025 for an update.
Once again, thank you for sticking with us – it is good to see you are not giving up and neither are we!
Best wishes,
Peter Truesdale
Chair of Governors