Dear Parents, Carers and Friends of Gorebridge Primary,

A huge welcome back from the staff, and myself. We hope you have had a brilliant holiday and are all ready to be part of a positive and fun year ahead. We started back for Inservice days last week and everyone is showing that they are full of energy and ideas eager to make your child’s start to year a good one.

Staffing

As you will probably be aware, staffing can be subject to change during the Summer holidays. Both vacancies for the job share posts were allocated from staff appointed by Midlothian council. A change that has occurred is in Primary 4. Miss Hutchison will now share with Mrs Meier. The teacher who had been allocated this post now has a full time post at another school. Miss Hutchison has visited the school to prepare for starting this week.

We will also welcome new staff within the school this week. Mr McKechnie will join us as a teacher in P3/4 sharing with Mrs Stewart. Miss Dodds will join us as a NQT in P2. We will also have a new music teacher starting with us, Mrs McInroy. Mrs McInroy plans to continue with Choir and recorder groups. We are delighted to have Mrs Cranston re-join us as a learning assistant. Also we will see more of Mrs Gavin as she will work with us as a learning assistant on Monday – Thursday in addition to her usual Friday.

Visiting specialists

Below is a list of specialists we will have and the days they will work:

Mrs Aird               Drama                   Monday, Tuesday and Friday

Mrs McInroy      Music                    Tuesday

Mrs Tait                P.E                          Wednesday and Thursday

In addition to this Mrs Hobson and Mrs Meikle will visit classes to teach a range of curriculum areas across the session.

P7 Camp

At the end of session Newbattle cluster schools decided not to continue with the P7 transition camp. Reasons for this were the increasing costs; difficulty high school has sending any staff which was one of the previous main benefits and also because of the high numbers of pupils the options for location for the camp were very limited. It was decided each school would plan their own experience and hopefully more transition experiences could happen so pupils get the opportunity to mix with each other before going to high school. At Gorebridge we have a very successful P6 camp so having a P6 and P7 camp can be very challenging financially. We would still like there to be a camp / overnight experience for our P7s so we are currently looking at options.

Changes

Over the next few weeks you will hear about some changes we have started to make. We have drafted a new approach to behaviour and relationships and will start to introduce this. We will consult our parents in due course to get your feedback so that we can adapt it. Once complete this policy will be available to you all. Additionally classes will start to introduce Seesaw. Seesaw is an app which allows your child to share with you what they are doing in class. The following link will give you some background https://web.seesaw.me/parents.

In September we want to work with the whole community to refresh our vision and values. Watch out for more information on this.

I look forward to speaking to you all and catching up soon.

Yours Sincerely

Mr Wood