Over the Christmas holidays, my family and I always like to complete a Christmas jigsaw. We have a few 1000 piece sets that we’ve been given over the years, and it’s always a fun challenge to try and put them together to make the complete picture. You can see our progress below!

As we were putting the jigsaw together this Christmas, I was thinking about the Academy: how every piece is different and unique, but every piece needs to be in the right place, to fit, to belong, in order to make the complete picture. We work really hard every day to help ensure that students and staff are slotted in to help make the whole thing work.

But I was also thinking about how every individual is made up of thousands of tiny pieces. These micro-decisions, little things that make up our daily lives in school. I spoke to students in assembly last week about some of these component parts:

• Lessons: including our favourite lessons and those that we find more challenging. Our curriculum is made up of lots of component parts which all work together to make a strong, deep and broad understanding of our world. Every single piece counts.
• Social times: ensuring that the Academy is and feels safe, welcoming and friendly for everyone in it, is everyone’s responsibility.
• Punctuality: we are particularly focused on this important life skill at the moment, and our students are working really hard to make sure that they are on time, every time.
• Attendance: similarly, we have been really impressed by our students’ efforts to ensure that they attend school every day, every lesson that they are able to.
• Extra curricular: both within school and beyond, the activities our students are involved in all add up to build their skills, knowledge, character and confidence.
• Values: our values of kindness, curiosity and determination underpin everything we do, and work together to support character development in our students
• Wellbeing: linked to last week’s assembly on sleep, we know that looking after ourselves is important. Diet, exercise, sleep and a balanced approach to health and wellbeing are all important.

In our school, and in ourselves, every single piece matters.