Hello everyone and I hope firstly that all of you are keeping well.

As you know from the recent updates shared on social media, we have listened to all the views submitted and updated our ‘New Schooling’ offer information.

Many of you may have already received a call from one of the staff team to complete your child’s risk assessment. Once these have been completed for all our students, alongside the ones for the premises and staffing, we will be able to get back in contact with what the new schooling will look like for your child. The offer will be very much individualised to meet the needs of our students, ensuring that learning can continue in the safest way possible for all.

With the ever changing climate and the uncertainty COVID has brought, I wanted to take some time to think about how we as staff will be working to best support our students when they do return. Life at college will change. Our students and staff have all been through a very difficult and challenging time and this cannot be taken for granted. As a Head, I do not expect that my students and staff should return to ‘normal’ – I will be making sure that they are given the time to talk about what has actually happened/is happening now in the world around them. We will be looking at what a Recovery curriculum looks like and working with our colleagues in the mental health sector to use their skills and advice to support our students. We all want some normality but we also need to be able to talk about what has happened and how it has made us all feel. One of our Digit4ll students, Kai, has created a video all about Mental Health and how it affects us all.

Our Lumenus students have also been busy, as Mrs Preston explains..

Some Lumenus students are currently involved in a project, ‘Theatre and the World Crisis’ with Oldham Theatre Workshop and students from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. The RCSSD students, who are running the programme, have named themselves The Heartwood Initiative and are working with a professional playwright and their academic staff. They have created 6 online videos for participating students to watch that include a step by step guide to writing your own play. We are on week 3 – plot. After the six weeks our students will submit their scripts and some will be performed by RCSSD students and broadcast via a live stream.

In between script writing, Lumenus have been working hard on their living skills too. Beth in particular deserves a special mention – she has been turned her hand to all sorts of jobs around the house, from painting the fence..

..mowing the lawn..

..and cleaning the garden..

..to reading books, baking and doing a lot of eating!

Beth is staying positive and is missing everyone – we think she’ll be glad to get back to college for a rest at this rate! Well done Beth, we’re very impressed!!

I will leave you with a new challenge for next week from Mrs Needham..

Let us know if you need a reminder of your login details and get ready to score lots of points – there are prizes to be won!!

Have a lovely weekend everyone and stay safe,

Jaina and the Team

Click here for this week’s news from Graham

You can view our previous blog entries here

News from the Learning Centre and New Bridge School can be found here