After all the excitement last week of football tournaments, exams, theatre visits and the Disney residential, our final GCSEs took place on Tuesday and this week has been relatively quieter.

We would like to welcome Mr Jack Flanagan to New Bridge School. Mr Flanagan is a newly appointed teacher and is working in Year 8 until the end of term. We wish him every success in his teaching career. On Friday Miss Bickerstaff, also newly appointed, spent the day getting to know her group next year. We also wish her every success at New Bridge.

The girls’ football team had a fabulous day out at the Etihad Academy on Wednesday and all were proud receivers of medals. It is a great experience for our girls to take part in these tournaments competing with schools from across the North West. Miss Wright spent the day with them..

On Wednesday we went to Manchester City’s football campus for the girls’ City in the Community football competition. We had 2 new members in the team, Shazia and Sarah, and they were made to feel very welcome by all the other players. The girls were a credit to themselves and New Bridge throughout the day. They showed amazing football skills and fantastic team work, encouraging and praising each other and keeping calm in some challenging situations..

There has been a massive improvement in the quality of football and this was apparent when the girls won their first two games. Solid defending from Shazia, outstanding goal keeping from Sabiha and composure in front of goal from Tamzin contributed to the victories. Zanub and Sarah worked tirelessly in each game and Maryam played really well in goal to help the girls. The attitude from each girl in every game was fantastic, never giving up, even in the game we lost. WELL DONE, GIRLS!

It is always great to hear how well our students are doing on their work experience. One of the key areas of development for our young people is their life and work skills and we’d like to report on one of our stars, ‘Worker of the Week’ Chris..

Chris is on placement at The Atrium Café where he has worked extremely hard over the past few weeks. When he arrives he immediately puts on his apron and washes his hands and then starts stocking the fridges and snacks. He made an excellent impression with the First Choice Homes film crew last week, where he was filmed at work and interviewed about The Atrium. His customer service skills are really good and he wishes all staff at FCHO a good day and thanks them for their custom. He has come a long way with his money skills over the past term and he doesn’t even want a break now as he likes to carry on with his job role. Well done, Chris!

Chris is currently preparing to join the Bridging the Gap programme in September; he has been on an immense journey with New Bridge and we are all very proud of him..

The past few months have been busy in the Music Department, with Live Music Now! returning to do some workshops and performances for our students. We have had Kathryn Williams and Elinor Nicholson delivering workshops to our young people over the last half term. They have worked with our young people on musical expression and composition – Elinor’s harp was a big hit with everyone, and Miss Ward’s class were enthralled with Kathryn’s flute..

You may remember us mentioning just before half term how our young people at the Learning Centre and New Bridge School were entertained by the fantastic Borealis Saxophone Quartet who performed a wide variety of musical works for Saxophone. You could hear the excitement from our young people as they looked at, listened to, and touched the instruments. Borealis were recently featured on BBC Radio 3 on the BBC Introducing Artist Series and they certainly proved extremely popular with our young people, as you will understand when you see part of their wonderful performance which we’re delighted to be able to share with you..

Borealis said afterwards,

We really enjoyed visiting New Bridge School as part of the ‘Live Music Now!’ scheme on Wednesday. We played lots of different music and the students were fantastic at joining in with conducting the quartet and clapping along with different rhythms for one of our pieces. It was wonderful to hear some great singing from everyone at the end when we played ‘Let It Go’ from Frozen!

Currently, we are happy to have a familiar face rejoin us! Delia Stevens (Percussion) returns to us this year, bringing with her this time Ben Sayah (Guitar). Our young people have already recognised Delia in the corridors, hoping they will get to work with her. Delia and Ben are working on some ‘Junk Yard Samba’ and ‘Ukulele Blues’ with students from Hollinwood Academy. We are excited to announce that Kabantu (formerly Project Jam Sandwich) will be returning to on July 18th to perform two exciting concerts for our young people. You can see Kabantu’s upcoming performances and other projects at www.Kabantu.com – definitely worth a look!

We were thrilled to hear of another success this week, when one of our Digit4ll students, Tom, was awarded the prestigious Sir John Moores Award for Young Enterprise. Tom has worked extremely hard with our New Bridge Enterprises, not just in his role as Finance Director but also in design and promotion, presenting our ideas to others, trading at regional events not to mention being a fantastic motivator for others too. Tom stood out against hundreds of other young people across the North West to win this award and we are very proud of him – well done, Tom!

Next week it is the turn of Year 11 to venture out of school on their last school residential. They are staying at Hafan Y Mor Haven Holiday Resort in Pwllheli, Wales. We are sure they will have a great time away and we’re looking forward to hearing all about it when they return!

Have a great weekend,

Judith and Dawn

You can find our full blog here

Click here to read this week’s blog from Graham