I was late on my previous blog of October/November, and now I have managed to be even later with my blog of December/January, which now also needs to encompass February and March.

I suppose it is apt that I am writing this in the last week of the Spring term, on the 31^st of March, before I have to add April to the list of months past.

It has been a very busy Spring term with numerous highlights, such as the number of Year 11 parents attending our mock results evening back at the beginning of March. We had 85% attendance, which is incredible. We are also extremely optimistic this year about the predictions for Year 11 in their summer GCSE exams.

One of the key reasons for this is the level of attendance. Year 11 are currently 1% above national average for the Year to date, with girls being 2.7% above national, which is phenomenal. We are also 2% higher on attendance at this time than we were last year with Year 11. The other fantastic news to share about Year 11 is that they are smashing the rewards with a total of 41,198 compared to 29,634 for Year 11 in 23/24. This means a total improvement of 11,564 positives for the year group, which works out on average 68 more positives per student compared to previous years.  For the first time as well, in the whole history of the time I have been at Crookhorn (and let’s face it, that is a long time), we have 45 Gold certificates achieved, 21 Platinum certificates and even 11 Governors’ Awards. This is just fantastic and a testament to the hard work and positive outlook of so many of our students.

Attendance across the College has been superb this spring term, as you can see from the graph below which tracks our weekly attendance against national:

As you can see, we had a big dip two weeks before we broke up for Christmas, where the College was pulverised by the flu. It was a horrible bug that lingered on for a long time. But we started to come back up again in the week before we broke up and then, in the Spring term, we have consistently been above national attendance, with the week of the 17th March seeing us 2.1% above national attendance. I would like to thank all parents for working in partnership with us to encourage your children to come in, and as a College we continue to strive to make College an unmissable experience for them!

As many of you will be aware from headlines in the news since Labour’s  election victory, there is a growing expectation by the Government that mobile phones should be banned in schools due to the harm caused by social media. I have felt vexed about this for some time because, as you know, our curriculum is based around digital access, and we also spend a lot of time educating students about how their mobile phones can be used positively for learning rather than just as a tool for social media. Over the last couple of weeks, the demand has grown stronger and stronger due to the Netflix drama, ‘Adolescence’.

In its usual sensationalist way, the press has picked up on this drama and focussed primarily on the access students have to their phones in school. Only one of the episodes from the drama is focussed on the school, and whilst the overall series is brilliant on so many levels, the episode filmed in the school is unfortunately a poor representation of how a school actually operates. Nevertheless, the current pressure around mobile phones in school has raised questions for us at the College, and we are considering our options going forward, and what this could look like from September 2025.

What the press and government have failed to do over recent years, as the social media virus has spiralled out of control, is focus on the tech companies who hide behind the importance of ‘freedom of speech’ and therefore do nothing to regulate or police the toxic content that can be posted on their platforms.  As a result, it is left to parents and schools to try and provide the education to shield and encourage self-censorship for impressionable teenagers, whilst we all pray that they progress through the adolescent years and emerge safe on the other side.

As this is such a fast-moving and dynamic part of our lives, we can sometimes feel bewildered and overwhelmed by what we should be looking out for, and how we can best support our young people. The use of emojis, for example, as part of a coded language used by teenagers, was very much a part of the Netflix series. Who knew!! To this end, I have attached a diagram at the end of this blog that helps decode emojis and their meanings for you to look at. If you see these on your child’s phone, and there appears to be no context to them, it’s a sign that a conversation with your child is possibly needed.

If parents are interested, we can also email you a document which will help you to understand the acronyms you might see in your child’s text messages. If you would like a copy of this document, please email the College at admin@crookhorn.hants.sch.uk  and we can send it straight out to you.

Never before has the partnership between parents and schools been more important. In reality, we are pretty much being left to defend the current generation of children from this social media curse by ourselves, and so we need to support and help each other as much as we can!