Month: September 2024

Open Evening 2024

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It was great to open up our Academy to visitors on Wednesday for our annual open evening. The rain held off (mostly!) and we welcomed several hundred families onto site to visit our faculties, hear from our students, see our facilities and hear from me about our vision, values and purpose.

We have had some wonderful feedback from families who visited on our student helpers, who are the backbone of open evening. They are tour guides who take families around the Academy, explaining about all the different buildings and what it is like to be a student at Churchill. They are helpers in faculties, running demonstrations and helping our visitors engage in the activities. They run stalls in our extra-curricular showcase. They are performers, working in drama, dance, music and art to show their work in progress. And Hannah, Kristupas, Maisie, Anna, Lexi and Caitlin were speakers, showing great confidence and poise in addressing the audience in the pool hall during the presentations.

Open evening is a great opportunity to show off the school that we are all so proud of. Even an unplanned fire alarm didn’t put us off! It was great to meet so many future students – we look forward to seeing you all next year.

Applications for place in Year 7 at Churchill Academy & Sixth Form for September 2025 are open now. The North Somerset applications page is here. If you live outside North Somerset you should apply to the local authority where you live – if you enter your home postcode here it will take you to the correct website for you to apply from. We look forward to hearing from you!

Making a positive difference

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At Churchill our purpose is “to inspire and enable young people to make a positive difference.” The primary way our students do this is by making a positive difference to themselves through the process of self-improvement: learning new things, building their knowledge, enhancing their skills, developing their confidence and character. Every day, in every way, we all get better.

As staff working at Churchill, our goal is inspire and enable those young people to make those positive differences. Every day, I look back on the events of the day and reflect on the things that we have done which have helped students (and staff) to improve. What have we taught them? How have we helped? What problems have we been able to solve? It’s a good way to stay positive, because every day we know we have made a difference.

As the Headteacher, my role is about school improvement: making a positive difference to Churchill Academy & Sixth Form. As I look back over the time that I have worked at the school, I am really proud of the positive differences I can see. I see this in the fabric of the Academy: the Alan Turing Building, the Athene Donald Building, the rebuilt Stuart and Lancaster block, the redecorated Sports Hall, the new Pool Hall and facilities in the sports centre building, even the resurfaced coach loop! All these things make a positive difference to the daily experience at school.

I also see it in the positive differences we’ve made to our processes, policies and approaches. The improvements we’ve made in teaching and learning; the improvements we’ve made in behaviour; the improvements we’ve made in our systems. And we continue that work every day, looking to keep on getting better.

And finally, I see it in the people who work here – those who’ve been here longer than me, and those who have been appointed under my watch. We have an amazing team of staff, all of whom are dedicated to the Academy’s mission and purpose. It’s a privilege to work alongside such dedicated professionals, all of whom are striving to make children’s lives better.

Improvement is a work in progress, and it always will be: but I am proud to think that the Academy is continuing that work every day. We will never be perfect – and that is what keeps the job interesting. There is always more to learn. We can always get better. And we will.

Prize Winners 2024

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On Wednesday evening we held our annual Presentation Evening to award our Academy prizes. We were joined by Gary Lewis, Chief Executive Officer of the Lighthouse Schools Partnership, and Ben Hardy, the Chair of the Academy’s Local Governing Body. We also welcomed John Buckler, whose family continues to sponsor the Wildlife Prize in memory of Jean Buckler, and Vikki Caldwell who kindly donated the Soaring High, Going Further Prize for Geography in memory of her daughter Fiona Braidwood.

Presentation Evening is a very special event in the Academy’s busy calendar. This evening celebrates the achievements of our highest-performing students, the crème-de-la-crème of Churchill’s excellent student body. Quite rightly, the main focus of the evening is on academic success, and in particular those students who distinguished themselves in their public examinations, both at GCSE and at A-level. But at Churchill we recognise that a school is about more than just the examination results that young people achieve, so we were really proud also to be awarding prizes for service to the community, for progress and improvement, for compassion, for resilience, and for attitudes to learning, all of which often go hand in hand with academic success.

I often speak to our students about why we are here; why our school exists; what our purpose is. Based on our three core values of kindness, curiosity and determination, we have set ourselves the goal of inspiring and enabling all our young people to make a positive difference both in their time at the Academy and, perhaps more importantly, when they leave us. If we have done our job properly, our young people will go out into the world with the knowledge, skills, character and confidence to make the world a better place. Some of them will do it in small ways, others will change it in ways we can’t even imagine yet.

We live in an uncertain world, where many of the certainties that previous generations have taken for granted are in flux, and the way things have always been done doesn’t seem to cut it any more. To older people like me, this can be worrying; but to the younger generation, it presents an opportunity to make things anew, and to do them better. The young people we celebrated on Presentation Evening – and so many of their peers – should fill us all with hope for the future.

Click here to view the list of Prize Winners for 2024 and click here for past winners.

Welcome back – September 2024

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Welcome back to a new academic year at Churchill! It has been great to see our staff and students as they have returned this week. Our new Year 7 and 12 students have settled really well, and our returning students have come back with a really positive attitude. It’s been a really calm start to the term – long may it continue!

Looking back over the summer, we have much to celebrate and be proud of. Our site team, IT network team, cleaners and a range of contractors have been hard at work upgrading and developing the Academy’s infrastructure.

The Sports Hall has been completely repainted and refurbished, including the changing rooms; our coach loop has been resurfaced; new site security features have been enabled; and every room in the Academy has been cleaned, refreshed, and prepared for the new term. Lots of work has also gone on behind the scenes in IT, improving WiFi, refreshing our systems, and making sure we are ready to go with the best possible hardware and software for our students.

We also celebrated some excellent exam results over the summer, with A-level and GCSE students reaping the rewards of their hard work and dedication with proud smiles – as you can see below. You can read more about the results days on the website: GCSE results and Sixth Form results.

As I write this blog, the summer holiday is already vanishing in the rear-view mirror as we are up and running for the new academic year. Over the next few weeks we have our parent information evenings for each year group as follows:

  • Monday 9th September – Year 11
  • Tuesday 10th September – Year 8
  • Monday 16th September – Year 10
  • Tuesday 17th September – Year 9
  • Wednesday 18th September – Year 12
  • Monday 23rd September – Year 7
  • Tuesday 24th September – Year 13

The evenings will take place in the Academy Hall at 6:00pm. We also have our Presentation Evening next week, and we are looking forward to our Open Evening for future students on Wednesday 25th September. It’s going to be a busy term!