Open Evening 2023

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Our open evening is a great opportunity for us to show off our school to children in primary school who are thinking about their choices for secondary education – and their families! We strongly believe that our students are our greatest ambassadors, and this year we had over 300 of them on site acting as tour guides, ambassadors for faculties, or taking part in rehearsals for our upcoming production of High School Musical – on stage. As ever, our students were amazing, and I want to thank them all for their brilliant contribution.

There was a real buzz around the Academy site as families came to visit us. Thankfully Storm Agnes, which was forecast to hit on Wednesday evening, only provided a strong breeze on what was otherwise a lovely autumn evening. Visitors got to sample all of our subject areas and a range of our extra-curricular activities across the site, as our future students collected stickers in their passport books with the promise of a “future student” badge from the Sixth Form if they collected them all!

My part in the proceedings was to present our vision, values and purpose to assembled visitors in the hall. I was delighted we had full houses for both presentations! As ever, I wanted the students’ voices to come through strongly, as they are able to “tell it like it is” from their perspectives. I have to say, I was bursting with pride a I listened to Bruce and Oliviya in Year 13, and Katie and Erin from Year 11, describe their experiences at Churchill and how it has shaped them into the wonderful young adults they have become. But it was Lola, Henry, Grace and Edward from Year 7 who stole the show: only at Churchill for three weeks, and already with the confidence to stand up and speak to an audience of nearly 400 people about their experience of transition from primary to secondary, and starting at Churchill. It was wonderful!

Next week we have two open mornings, on Tuesday 3rd and Wednesday 4th October, for parents and children to come and see the school in action on a normal day and to see what it’s really like at Churchill. Tickets can be booked on Eventbrite via our website.

The deadline for submitting applications to join Churchill Academy & Sixth Form in Year 7 is 31st October. All the links you need can be found on our admissions page. We look forward to seeing you soon!

The House System at Churchill

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The house system has always been integral to the identity of Churchill Academy & Sixth Form. When the school was founded in 1956, as Churchill County Secondary School, it was founded with four “houses” at the very core of the school, named after royal houses of England – Hanover, Stuart, Tudor and Windsor. You can see the original school logo, with the four houses on four corners of a shield, on this bookplate presented to the school’s very first Head Boy, Ivan Devereux, in 1957:

The idea of “houses” in a school goes back to boarding school traditions, when children at a school would literally live in different houses around the school grounds, going to the school building for their lessons and returning to their boarding house for meals, “prep” (or homework) and to sleep in their dormitories. My uncle was actually the housemaster at a boarding school in Yorkshire for many years, and lived in the boarding house permanently with his family. This meant that – in the school holidays – we had the run of the whole, empty place!

My own secondary school was not a boarding school – although it had been historically. This meant that my school also had houses, named after the original housemasters who first took charge of them. There were six houses, and I was in Calverts House – named after Mr Calvert, I presume. I still feel a really close affinity to my school house, and I am still proud to be a Calverts student all these many years later! I know the same is true at Churchill, because many families have a long tradition of grandparents, parents and children being in the same house. This feeling of belonging cannot be manufactured; it is grown and developed over years and years of careful nurturing.

In September 2020, we added Lancaster House to the four original houses at Churchill. Despite the fact that we made the announcement the week before schools went into lockdown, we still managed to implement the change when students returned to face-to-face education following the first round of pandemic closures. Lancaster is now fully established within the Academy, and even managed their first victory in the House Cup in summer 2023!

Pictured above: Lancaster winning the House Cup and Sports Day; Hanover winning the tug of war trophy; Tudor winning the Academics Cup; and Windsor winning the Head of House Challenge Cup and the Senior Trek shield. It must be Stuart House’s turn to win something this year!

Being part of a house is about more than just competitions and trophies (although those are great too!) It is about belonging to something bigger than yourself – your “team” within the larger school. We ensure that students’ behaviour, attendance, and contribution to the Academy all made a difference to their house, as well as to them individually; but it is also the house that is the first stop for pastoral care, student welfare, communication with home and behaviour, through the team of tutors and the fantastic Heads of House. And, even more importantly, the house councils are a vital engine of student leadership within the Academy, driving real change and making a positive difference to our community.

This year’s house captains

At the head of that student leadership effort is our team of house captains. This year’s crop of ten are an exceptional group of students, who are already making a big impact in their leadership of their houses. Heads of House have been running assemblies this week, and it has been great to see the house captains taking their role in that. Their photos are also now up in reception!

As I said at the start, the house system is at the core of Churchill Academy & Sixth Form. The current staff and students are just the stewards of something much bigger than themselves – something that stretches back to the school’s foundation, and which we will pass on – stronger than ever – to those who come after us.

Presentation Evening 2023

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Our annual presentation evening is a great event in the Academy’s calendar. The 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 have distinguished themselves in their public examinations, both at GCSE and at A-level. But we recognise that a school is about more than just the examination results that young people achieve, so we were also really proud award 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. This dedication to developing the whole person, academically and personally, is at the heart of our mission and purpose here at Churchill Academy & Sixth Form.

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. We aim that the young people who go through Churchill Academy & Sixth Form 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, but we are incredibly proud of the young people who attend our Academy and who are celebrated at Presentation Evening.

I was absolutely delighted to be joined this year by two guest presenters on stage, to help me hand out the prizes. Both of them gave fantastic speeches to inspire our audience of prize winners and supporters.

Our first guest of honour was Meg Abernethy-Hope. I taught Meg A-level Media Studies in my final years as Deputy Headteacher at Chew Valley School. Meg was always a wonderful student, with the kind of confident fearlessness that inspires everyone around her. Meg was already modelling when she was at school, and has gone on to a successful career as a model and an actress. But it is Meg’s activism that has come to define her work. As co-founder of The Billy Chip, she turned a personal and family tragedy into a force for social good. Meg presented the Academy & Community prizes, before giving a fantastic account of her experiences at school and beyond, and how the Academy’s values of kindness, curiosity and determination helped her through the many challenges which she has faced, and guided her to the incredible achievements she has already accomplished. We look forward to her forthcoming TED talk!

Our second guest was Anna Jones. Anna was a recipient of a prize at Presentation Evening 2016, when she was a student at Churchill. Anna went on to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge, and is now studying for a Doctorate at Wolfson College, Oxford in the long term Ecology lab. Anna is investigating how ground level ozone exposure affects tree health and growth, using a combination of satellite data, spectroscopy and individual tree physiology to understand how ozone damage scales from local to global vegetation. Anna joined me to present the academic prizes and awards based on this year’s exam results, before giving a wonderful speech of her own about her time at Churchill and in academia, where she now climbs into forest canopies to collect data on the impact of ozone on tree health – relying on skills she first encountered on work experience in Year 10 at the Academy!

It was wonderful to see our students celebrated in this way, and I look forward to the bright futures they all have ahead of them. You can see a full list of this year’s prize winners, and the Celebration of Success Roll of Honour, alongside an archive of past winners, on the prize winners page of the Academy website.

Welcome Back

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Welcome to a new school year! It has been wonderful to see our staff and students back at the Academy this week. Our inset day on Monday was focused on staff training and development to ensure that all colleagues were properly prepared. It was a packed agenda, with an exam results review followed by sessions on our strategic planning, working within the Lighthouse Schools Partnership, behaviour management, safeguarding, and SEND (special educational needs and disabilities), before faculties and houses met with their own specific agendas.

On Tuesday, we welcomed Year 7 and 12 into school – our two “new starter” year groups. Both settled immediately into the routine, with really positive feedback and some excellent learning taking place. Having the Academy to themselves for the day ensured that new students could find their way around and get properly settled, before the rest of the school returned on Wednesday and Thursday.

In my “welcome back” assembly on Wednesday, I explained all the work that had gone on over the summer. Our site team and the IT network team have been busy, as have contractors completing projects across the site including improved dining facilities in Windsor, with new flooring and additional seating; the completion of our decarbonisation project in Sixth Form, Hive, Hall & Gymnasium, which means that these areas are all now running air conditioning from a low-carbon air source heat pump. New paving was laid outside the Turing building, additional new social area furniture has been placed around the site (inside and outside), the Windsor and Hanover toilets have been refurbished, the Sports Centre has been emptied with works starting on the roof, windows, doors and the heating system, and there has been lots and lots of painting! As a result the student social areas and circulation space in Lancaster, Stuart and Turing all look fantastic as our students have returned.

As always at the start of each term, I also outlined our expectations of student behaviour, including the new approaches we are taking this academic year. It was fantastic to see such a positive response from the students – and I am very grateful to families for their support in ensuring correct uniform for school.

Although it has been very warm this week, we have got off to a very good start!

And the winner is…

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This year’s House Cup competition has been fiercely contested! The House Cup is the trophy of trophies, with every other competition across the year feeding into Mr Davies’ super-computer to arrive at the final result. Every day’s attendance, every reward point, house match, inter-house competition, participant in Sports Day, commendation and contribution ultimately counts towards the House Cup total.

Sports Day is a big part of the House Cup, and this year Tudor’s dominance was finally broken! Hanover won the tug of war competition, thanks to dominant performances from their girls’ teams across the year groups. House captains Zoe and Beth lifted that trophy on Wednesday afternoon, before the final result was announced. It came down to the final two relay races for Lancaster to overhaul Tudor’s lead – by only three points! – but Katie and Erin were delighted to raise the Sports Day cup.

You can read more about Sports Day (with photos, our student newspaper, the scores and the records) on the Academy website

Following Sports Day, we were able to calculate the House Cup totals. Several other competitions had already concluded: Windsor were victorious in the Head of House Challenge and the Senior Trek, so House Captains Evie and Joe were able to receive the trophy and the shield on Thursday morning, followed by Theo and Liam for Tudor in the Academics Cup.

Finally, it was time for the main event. This year, I typed the results live into our Daily Notices Google Doc, with the students in their tutor rooms watching eagerly for the result, knowing that the winning house would process through the Academy to the Hall to receive the cup. It was a real thrill for me to actually hear the “oohs” and “aahs” coming from Windsor and Stuart as I typed into my laptop outside the Hall! But that was nothing to the cheer that went up as Lancaster House were announced as the winners, and gathered in the July sunshine to hold the cup aloft and celebrate with Mr Thomas and the returning Mrs Taylor. A great way to celebrate the end of the year!

The next three years: looking ahead

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This week, in my Headteacher’s Update letter, I announced the publication of the Academy’s new strategic plan.

The plan is designed to take us from September 2023 to August 2026, mapping our journey as a school over the coming three years. It is the result of lengthy and painstaking discussions with the governing body, built into the framework from the Lighthouse Schools Partnership and supported by our school improvement partner.

The plan has five aims:

  1. All students demonstrate excellent behaviour, effort and attitudes to learning
  2. Every student enjoys the highest quality of education
  3. The personal development programme ensures that students embody the Academy’s
    vision, values and purpose
  4. Leadership and management is ambitious and persistent in pursuit of our goals
  5. We are fully integrated into the vision, ethos, systems and structures of the Lighthouse
    Schools Partnership to the mutual benefit of the Academy and the Trust

The plan is designed around our existing vision, to set no limits on what we can achieve; our purpose, to inspire and enable young people to make a positive difference; and our values of kindness, curiosity, and determination. It focuses on the young people in our Academy not just in terms of their academic outcomes, but how we can develop them as fully rounded individuals. We plan to focus on their personal development, their behaviour and attitudes, and their wellbeing and mental health by ensuring that they feel a strong sense of safety and belonging in our learning community.

At the same time, we are also looking to our employees. We aim to ensure that our staff are well-trained so they can be the very best that they can be in their roles. We want to focus on their professional development and their wellbeing as part of our People Strategy, so that we can continue to recruit and retain the best staff to support us on our journey.

We are also looking to our role within the Lighthouse Schools Partnership. As a new school in the trust, we have much to do over the coming years to ensure we enjoy the full benefits of being part of this wider family of schools, whilst using our expertise to further strengthen the work of the trust to the mutual benefit of all involved.

As we say in the introduction to the plan, this September marks the beginning of a new phase for Churchill Academy & Sixth Form. We are excited about the future.

Activities Week 2023

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Activities Week is an important date our calendar, and a vital part of our curriculum. The week gives our students opportunities to broaden their horizons, try new experiences, develop their skills, and build their character and confidence in new settings and different environments. Through a combination of “basecamp” activities in school, day trips and residentials we provide a huge range of opportunities that students can personalise by selecting the range of activities that fit their interests and enthusiasms. We hope that students will make memories for a lifetime.

At the same time, Year 10 and some sixth form students were out on work experience, whilst a group of Year 12 students were in Cambridge getting a taste of University life with HE+ and our Duke of Edinburgh Silver participants were out completing their expeditions. These adventures extend the vision for Activities Week, by continuing to build students’ skills, experience and confidence in new contexts. As ever, we are so proud of our students for the way in which they rise to the challenges and represent the Academy so positively.

The photos below give just a sample of some of the things our students got up to over the course of the week!

This year’s Activities Week was threatened by the two days of industrial action announced by the NEU. We are hugely grateful to the teaching and support staff who made the decision to support Activities Week over the legitimate strike action, which enabled all of our planned activities to go ahead uninterrupted.

Raising aspirations: Year 11 at Oxford University

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I have just returned from a fantastic day with 26 of our Year 11 students visiting Oxford University. Fresh from completing their GCSEs and Sixth Form induction day, we headed off to the dreaming spires on a sunny Thursday, ahead of the Year 11 Ball tomorrow!

Our host for the day was the wonderful Evie from Exeter College’s Outreach team. She gave the students an introduction to Oxford, including some myth-busting, followed by a tour of Exeter College, including the beautiful chapel. This was followed by a fascinating taster session for English Literature, looking at some eighteenth-century satire. The students engaged brilliantly with the text and the session, exploring concepts such as the authorial contract, and making links with contemporary political rhetoric as well as their knowledge of Dickens and Victorian literature. Evie said it was one of the best discussions she’d ever had in response to the session!

We were ready for a delicious lunch in Exeter College’s Hall, followed by a second taster session. This time, Ben from Brasenose College gave the students an experience of the sort of things they might learn about on an Experimental Psychology course. Again, our students excelled as they engaged with the interrelation of classical conditioning and the placebo effect – even suggesting an interesting new area of research into whether the placebo effect could be used in the fight against antibiotic resistance!

The day finished with a visit to New College, the college I studied at for my undergraduate degree and which is now home to ex-Churchill student Sarah, who has just finished her first year studying Chemistry. Sarah was part of the last group of Year 11 students I took to Oxford back in 2019 – we recorded a podcast together at New College earlier in the year reflecting on the impact of that experience. As our current Year 11 students took in the New College Chapel, Cloisters and the famous tree where Draco Malfoy was turned into a ferret by Mad-Eye Moody in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I hope some of them were similarly inspired to think about applying. Based on their performance in the taster sessions, they are more than capable of getting in!

The Future of Churchill Sports Centre

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We are delighted this week to be able to publish the news that the future of the Sports Centre building has finally been secured.

The Sports Centre, as many of you know, sits within the Churchill Academy & Sixth Form site. When Churchill first became an Academy in 2011, all the land within the site boundary transferred over to the Academy trust – except for the Sports Centre, which remained in the ownership of North Somerset Council and operated as a leisure centre for the local community.

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the leisure centre closed – and it has not reopened. For the past three years it has remained closed, whilst extensive discussions have taken place between the Academy, the council and the local community about its future. We have all been desperate to find a way to preserve the centre as an asset for the local community, and for the Academy. Since we joined the Lighthouse Schools Partnership on 1st April, the multi-academy trust has also been able to lend its expertise and resources to the discussions.

We are now able to confirm that the Council has agreed to transfer the sports centre building to the Lighthouse Schools Partnership (subject to approval by the executive member), along with a contribution of just over £600,000 towards repairs and building maintenance works that are essential to bring the building back into a fully usable condition. The full cost of these works is over a million pounds; the remainder of the money will come from the Lighthouse Schools Partnership, of which we are now a part.

In January, the council announced that the swimming pool would not reopen, and it has now been drained. This space will be turned into a multi-purpose hall, which we hope to be able to use flexibly for teaching, assemblies, and exams. This will mean that we will no longer have to shut the Academy’s own Sports Hall – and associated changing rooms – during exam seasons, reducing disruption to the PE curriculum and ensuring that we will have changing rooms available for students all year round!

The centre will also provide us with studio space for performing arts, and will become the new base for the PE department. We hope to use the additional space to free up existing Academy resources for much-needed student welfare facilities as well.

Community use has been at the heart of all our discussions over the past three years. An active and engaged group of local residents has been instrumental in campaigning and lobbying for the centre to remain a community resource, and we have been supportive of this ambition. Our Academy sits at the heart of our community, and we are keen to continue to play our part. Once the building is operational again, the facilities will be available to community groups just as our 3G pitch and sports hall have been throughout.

We are grateful to everyone involved in getting us to this point. Council officers have worked with us, as have the local community groups. Mrs Franklin and Mr Bigwood have spent hours locked in talks and discussions, and latterly Louise Malik, Chief Financial and Operating Officer for the Lighthouse Schools Partnership, has devoted many hours to delivering an agreement.

We now have quite a task ahead of us in planning the extensive building works required to repair, refurbish and redecorate the centre, to bring it up to standard for use by our staff, students and the community after three years of uncertainty. We are fortunate that the Lighthouse Schools Partnership will manage this project with us, freeing up valuable time for Academy staff to focus on our students. We anticipate that the centre will re-open in the early part of 2024. We will keep you posted!

Kindness, Curiosity and Determination

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It has been great to welcome the students back to term 6. It’s always a term of transition; with our Year 11 and 13 students off on study leave, the Academy feels a bit emptier. The tutor groups are missing their year elevens, so our year tens are now the senior main school students. The applications for the new house captains are coming in, and everyone is getting ready to welcome our new Year 7 and 12 students on the induction days coming up soon.

In my “welcome back” assemblies this week, I started with a bit of housekeeping. The Site Team and our contractors have been busy over the half term break: putting in replacement fencing, repainting classrooms and toilet areas, relocating one of our food pods, replacing windows, and making sure that everything is looking great for the students’ return. I thanked the students for their much improved use of the facilities, and urged them to ensure that they continue to look after them. There was also an opportunity for reminders about our classroom and social time expectations – and I never miss an opportunity for those!

My assembly this week focused mainly on our three Academy values: kindness, curiosity and determination. As I said in my end-of-term-5 Headteacher’s Update letter, over recent weeks I have been working with our governors on a review of our strategic planning and direction. This has taken us right back to the Academy’s vision, purpose and values, as we have reaffirmed our commitment to being a school in which we inspire and enable young people to make a positive difference, and to set no limits on what we can achieve. All of this work is underpinned by our three values.

This quotation, from aviator Amelia Earhart, guides our thinking about kindness. Kindness adds value because its impact is cumulative: the kinder we are, the kinder others become. The idea of “paying it forward” to create a positive community culture is a key part of this value.

When we first introduced our values, the students articulated what they meant for our behaviour in and around the Academy. Their description of kindness, cited above, captures that key element of our Academy community. It also underlines the fact that we all have a responsibility to that community – a responsibility to keep it healthy by maintaining the values which lie at its heart.

Curiosity is a strength of the mind. The quotation from Plutarch in the slide above emphasises the importance of taking an active role in learning, in seeking out new knowledge and skills: you can’t just wait for knowledge to come to you. You have to go out and get it. We can teach you: but only you can learn.

The students captured this spirit of curiosity in their values statement, which informs our approach to learning, which expects:

  • Determined and consistent effort
  • A hunger to learn new things
  • Challenging ourselves to go beyond what is comfortable
  • Viewing setbacks and mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow
  • Seeking and responding to feedback
  • Encouraging others to succeed

Determination is summed up in this quotation from inventor Thomas Edison, who achieved so much through constant trial and error, refinement and development, prototype after prototype. I have found Edison’s words of huge value to me in my own professional career as an adult: we all face challenges and struggles. If we give up, we are certain to fail. The only way to succeed is to keep trying.

These values form three sides of a character triangle: kindness, a strength of the heart; curiosity, a strength of the mind; determination, a strength of the will. Churchill students, who show all three values, will be well equipped to go out into the world and make a positive difference, setting no limits on what they can achieve.

I concluded the assembly with all the things we have to look forward to over the course of the rest of this term: it’s going to be a busy one!