GCSE Results 2023:

Congratulations to our students who today collected their GCSE results - well done to you all! After a challenging educational journey, as our families will be aware, we are very proud of what they have all achieved. It has been a pleasure to see so many of our students and families celebrating their achievements this morning and equally, where support and guidance has been needed, to ensure that every student recognises the many opportunities available to them for September.

Our Post 16 Team has been busily 'coursing' students and will continue to be available for students who want to consider and confirm their places with us. Please contact post16@exmouthcollege.devon.sch.uk if you wish to discuss or confirm your Post 16 courses with us by. If you have not yet applied and now wish to, you can do so by completing the application form on our website Exmouth Community College - Admissions (exmouthcollege.devon.sch.uk) We do of course wish every student all the very best with whatever next steps they take, both here in the Sixth Form, or beyond in further education, training or employment. 

Whilst National Headlines point to a significant reduction in top grades, and raised grade boundaries suppressing grades, we are delighted with the achievements of many of our students this year who have attained an impressive set of results. We are delighted that the students attainment has performed above levels in 2019, a genuinely great achievement in view of these circumstances. This is particularly impressive considering the significant increase in the proportion of students following more academically challenging qualifications; a tremendous reflection of student commitment and high aspiration. Over forthcoming weeks, as National Data sets our confirmed, we will update this page with further key information. 

These results are a testament to the hard work and dedication of students and staff who have worked together over the past few years. Our ambition is always to ensure that every student has the opportunity to flourish and is fully prepared for their future.

Each of our students receiving results today will have had their very own unique journey. Our staff know it has been far from straight forward for many of the students which is why we are so exceptionally proud of their individual achievements and the way they have persevered and showed great resilience.  

Mr Findel-Hawkins (Head of Year 11) said, 'I am so very proud of every Year 11 student receiving their GCSE results today. Their diligence and determination over the last two years is an inspiration to us all. I am sure that they would all like to join me in thanking their fantastic teaching and support staff who have worked alongside them throughout their time at the College. I wish our Year 11 all the best for the future and I have no doubt that the 'Class of 2023' will continue to do very well in the future as they have been an amazing group of young people'.

Mr Holt, Assistant Principal (KS4) added, 'congratulations to our Year 11's who have been a genuinely incredible year group. You have shown incredible courage and determination and have been a pleasure to work with. I wish you all the very best in the future and very much look forward to seeing many of you continue to enjoy your Post 16 studies here at the Exmouth'. 

Finally, I am sure the students would wish to join me in thanking parents, carers and other family members for all of their support during their time in Key Stage 4 and of course for the three years previous in Key Stage 3. My sincere thanks goes to all the staff, both teaching and support, involved in helping students achieve these fantastic results. From the Key Stage 4 team led by Mr Holt, fantastically supported pastorally and academically this year by Mr Findel-Hawkins (Head of Year 11), and Mrs O'Donnell (Pastoral Support Assistant), to the great team of teachers, tutors, support staff and Governors - thank you all. It has been my pleasure and a privilege to be the Principal of Exmouth Community College, and I wish the students, staff and wider community all the very best for the future.

Andrew Davis

Principal

Please click on the link below to access the Parent and Carer News

Please click on the attachment below to read the letter from Mr Inman, ECC's new Headteacher from September 2023

Dear Parents and Carers

As part of our parent and carer communication schedule, we had intended to send this email later in the term but in light of the sad news we shared with you last week, we felt it was vitally important to send it now to provide information which may help you support your child/children.

In this update we would like to share with you how we are promoting positive wellbeing for all in the College. Being mentally and physically healthy means that we feel good about ourselves, we make and keep positive relationships with others, allow ourselves to feel a full range of emotions and understand how we can manage these feelings.

Please find below information on the following:

· Lesson 42
· Wellbeing check
· Staff training & Counsellors
· Signposting
· PIPA
· The Wellbeing Award

Lesson 42
Every Wednesday in College students have Lesson 42. They start the day with this and are taught by their tutor as they know them best. During Lesson 42 students develop their knowledge of what wellbeing is, and how they can improve their own and recognise when they or their peers may need some extra support. The curriculum plan for Lesson 42 is on the College Website so you can see which areas are covered: https://www.exmouthcollege.devon.sch.uk/curriculum/subjects/citizenship-pshe

Wellbeing Check
Each term we ask students to complete a wellbeing check. This is just a few questions to find out how they have been feeling in the last few weeks. Tutors collect the responses and will be able to talk to students if there is anything that concerns them. The tutor will explain how they can support themselves, how the College can support them and may signpost them to other organisations who may be able to help.

Staff Training & Counsellors
Within College many staff have undertaken training so they can have useful conversations with students about how they feel. We also have College counsellors who students can see during the College day. Tutors will be able to explain to students how they can make an appointment. During last year we worked with the local Primary Care Network and Young Devon to establish a further full week of Wellbeing support run by Young Devon on site. The Pastoral staff can assist students in making a referral to them, or students can make a referral themselves. We have tried with this offer to introduce some flexibility to the times and so some sessions are available after 3pm for students who prefer that. If students want to make contact with their Pastoral teams they can always email them.

Signposting for Parents and Carers
Parents and Carers are an important part of the solution for a young person experiencing poor mental health. The pastoral staff for your child's year group will be able to share with you organisations and information that may help you access support for your child if you feel this would be useful. Our colleagues from Young Devon can also help particularly with completing forms for referrals to CAMHS. One of the best resources we often recommend is KOOTH. If you are not familiar with what they can offer, please take a look at their website https://www.kooth.com/

PIPA
We are always looking for professional learning for ourselves to ensure we can support your child. We have just been offered a really exciting opportunity for families of children in Years 7-10. Please find attached further information about how to take part in a family based mental health support study called PIPA which is being organised by the University of Warwick. Please do consider this. We know how busy everyone’s lives are so you may wish to share with grandparents who are able to take part in the study too. We also have a group of students who have signed up to join our Mental Health Ambassadors, they will commence their training in January. 

The Wellbeing Award
As a College, we are very committed to supporting our students with managing and having awareness of their own mental health and wellbeing. We take a whole College approach to this by ensuring our staff are also well supported and signposted if needed. We know that we can always do more to promote good mental health and wellbeing. We have therefore committed to working towards achieving The Wellbeing Award through Optimus Education. As a College we will spend 15 months gathering evidence, introducing strategies and re visiting some of our policies to ensure we meet very high standards of provision for emotional wellbeing and mental health for both students and staff. The first step in our journey will be asking all students, staff, parents and carers to complete a survey. This will be emailed home in the next few weeks. Please do take the time to complete it and support us in knowing what is going well and how we can improve further.

Finally, wellbeing is not just about having good mental health, there are many other aspects which play an important part. We are very pleased to see our after College activities resume and all the students taking part in clubs, fixtures and rehearsals following the restrictions of the pandemic. If you are not sure what is available please do look on the student bulletins on the website.

Kind regards

ECC

In this brief update I will focus on three areas,

• Feedback from an Ofsted monitoring visit in July 2021 which went very well
• The return of Family Forum (or Parent and Carer Forum as we used to call it)
• A quick questionnaire for you to complete on how the first few weeks of term have gone

Feedback from Ofsted

We were visited by Ofsted for a monitoring visit right at the end of the Summer term. We were pleased that the inspector recognised that leaders and those responsible for governance are taking effective action.

The tone of their short report was very positive and included positive comments about

• the new structure  of the senior leadership team which is having a positive impact on teaching, learning and the curriculum.
• a new Assistant Principal who is improving communication with our parents, carers and families.
• “acting swiftly” following the pandemic to put curriculum changes in place. This is particularly impacting on how we are helping students learn new knowledge. You will have seen from Mr Allen’s email about curriculum last week that all of our new curriculum plans for every subject in every year are now available for you to see on our website.
• Behaviour which they observed as “calm and orderly” due to our revised behaviour management policy. They were also positive about the additional support our specialist staff provide through a personalised curriculum.

Ofsted also asked us to consider further areas to develop

• To not use GCSE grades at Key Stage 3 which we will stop this academic year.
• While recognising that sometimes additional support for students with special needs from other agencies is out of our control we do want to further improve communication to the families of students with SEND which is why we have recently introduced a Family Forum focussed on SEND to help families understand how SEND works across Devon.
• Phonics is not normally taught in secondary settings other than to students with SEND however, we are aiming to increase staff understanding of phonics this year to help students become even better readers. This will build on the significant impact on reading ages that our Accelerated Reader programme is also having.

A link to the report can be found at Ofsted | Exmouth Community College

We are really pleased with the outcome of the report since Ofsted recognised that even during the pandemic we continued to enhance our procedures around behaviour as well as rewriting every curriculum in every subject for every year group based around mastery and the retention of knowledge. This work has been based around the latest research and by visiting some of the best schools in the country to see their practice and apply it to our context.

The parent and carer survey completed before the OfSTED visit was also the most positive we have had since Ofsted began their surveys. Thank you for your support – we really appreciate it.

The return of Family Forum (previously known as Parent/Carer Forum)

Unfortunately, due to Covid, we had to halt our put our  Parent/Carer Forum on hold, however, we are now in a position to restart these meetings.

Our next Family Forum meeting will take place on Thursday 2^nd December in the Telfer Centre (Gipsy Lane) at 5:30pm.

The Family Forum will happen every other half term with an SEND focussed Family Forum to demystify SEND in between.

Places will be limited since we want to give everyone the chance to have individual questions answered. The session will follow the format of previous forums whereby the senior team present on a couple of current issues, then we answer some questions that have been sent in prior to the meeting and then there is time afterwards for a cup of tea and individual discussions to be held with members of the senior team.

This particular meeting, our presentations will focus on updating you about our new curriculum and on our approaches to behaviour for learning.

In order to express your interest in attending the evening, you will find an invite at the end of the questionnaire which you can access via the link below. There is also a chance on the form to submit a question that you would like answered at the Forum.

Feedback from you

We are always keen to receive your feedback and do our best to take the views of parents and carers into account. As we have developed various aspects of the College your feedback has been important and has led to changes such as retaining students wearing their the PE kit on the day they have for most PE lessons for this term.

In order to continue this process we have put together a short survey based on the Ofsted questionnaire to get your feedback on how the first few weeks have gone.

This is particularly important now that schools are being advised by Public Health England that we are living with Covid and so extra-curricular clubs and activities, visits, along with music concerts and 10 Tors expeditions, have now restarted. 

The form only takes a minute to complete and at the end of the form is the invite to Family Forum.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=d7mDmVf8qkG-I5jxifmXu25flkeobZFCphnKUU-8Zl1UQ1VDM1lZQ045UUMyMlc3TldHOEpVUEI0Ni4u

Andrew Davis

Principal

So September is over and, incredibly, our amazing Year 7 students have completed their first few weeks with us.

They, along with all the other students, have made a fantastic start back to the College with school life slowly getting back to normal with clubs restarting and lessons able to be far more active with more discussions and practical work taking place.

Well done to everyone!

Open Evening and Open Weeks

We held our Open Evening last week with almost 1000 people attending the evening in a Covid safe way. It was fantastic to see the school buzzing with families and I am enormously grateful to all the students from across every year who helped out by leading tours, taking part in activities or speaking about their experiences of everything the College has to offer.

I have been conducting tours all week for families to see the College in action and due to huge demand we will continue to offer tours next week and beyond as well. So if you have a Year 5 or 6 child or know someone who is considering joining the College and haven’t booked a tour yet please do so in order that you can see everything we have to offer from Latin to Engineering to Textiles. Please contact Miss Powell for more details.

Our new Curriculum….

We have been delighted with the way students have engaged with our brand new curriculum. What we teach and the way we teach it has been re-designed in every subject in every year over the past few months. All of these curriculum plans will be made available on our website over the next few days so you can see where on their journey your child is.

The new curriculum is based around the latest research about how to sequence the curriculum and cognitive load theory to ensure that students learn and remember information in the best way possible.

Staff have decided on the most essential and important knowledge within each of their subjects which will enable a child to make really good progress. Their understanding will be checked on a regular basis that they have remembered the work with time then spent after the assessment during “Learn-Progress-Grow” lessons correcting any misunderstandings.

The importance of reading

An underpinning principle of our new curriculum is having students who are fluent in reading and comprehension as well as a good level of vocabulary. After the age of 8 most new words are learnt through reading rather than speaking. All students in Year 7 to 11 are expected to have an Accelerated Reader book and the first 5 minutes of every lesson is spent reading since it is so important. Accelerated Reader ensures that students are reading books in the “zone of proximal” development and so constantly pushes students to read increasingly difficult texts no matter what their ability.

Uniform

We have been really impressed with how smart the students look around the site and the pride with which they wear their uniform and PE kit. We outlined the importance of having a uniform that is ‘uniform’ across the college early in the year.

1. Promotes learning: we believe students’ focus should be on what they are learning and not on what they are wearing. Having a ‘uniform’ removes distractions.
2. Nourishes a sense of equality: when students are asked to wear the same uniform, unhealthy competitive feelings about their looks are reduced. Students can stand out because of their character, not because of what they are wearing.
3. Promotes community: our dress code compliments our learning culture. We are preparing our students for success beyond College, and in doing so believe that students should have clear expectations of professionalism. When our students wear a uniform they feel included. They are part of a team and are proud to be recognised as such.
4. Makes the morning rush less stressful! No indecisions about what to wear in the morning!
5. Improves safety: Our safeguarding systems are rigorous. The College uniform forms an important part of safeguarding. Students are quickly identifiable outside of the College gates and intruders are instantly recognised within.
6. Does not eliminate individuality: the character of our individual students are our focus. Our students stand out because of who they are and the positive impact they make, not how they look.

Thank you for all your continued support with this.

As always if there are any financial difficulties with buying pieces of uniform please let us know so we can help.

Class Charts

As many families know, we use Class Charts as a way of communicating home praise points as well as negative points that happen during the day. We are now also incorporating comments into those points so that you can see why your child has been awarded a positive or negative point. Class Charts is also linked into our rewards and we are really proud and amazed to say that some students have already reached the first badge – well done to them! If you haven’t already downloaded the app please do so – we have now also included student timetables so you can easily check what your child’s day looks like. There will be an opportunity for year 7 parents and carers to ask questions and receive some support with using ClassCharts during our Meet the Tutors Evening o 13^th October.

New buildings

Our new build on Green Close continues to progress really well – As you can see lots of steelwork has gone up this week! This is due to complete September 2023 and will house a 450 seat auditorium, new library, drama studios, Gym, Design Technology rooms, Science laboratories and teaching rooms for History, Geography and Religious Education. We are super excited!

We are also making good progress on the refurbishment of the Grange and expect to hear about our new £3.5 million Maths block next week.

Dates for your diary:

6^th October – Post16 Open Evening: A chance for year 11 students to visit Post16 subjects, speak with staff and students about their next steps with us here at ECC. I strongly encourage all students attend as life in Post16 is very different to Key Stage 4, and we are incredibly proud of the provision we offer in years 12 and 13.

13^th October – Meet the Tutors Evening: An opportunity for parents and carers of students in year 7, 8, 10 and 12 to meet their child’s tutor and discuss how they are settling in thus far. We have decided to invite parents and carers of students in year 8 this year as, due to Covid, there was not an opportunity to run this event last year.

Thank you once again for all your support!

Best wishes

Andrew Davis