The keys to success…

Last week, as you all know, was disrupted by poor weather. I know you were set work to complete on Insight, but this is not the same as being taught in school. It is very important that we all work to catch up.

 I said in assemblies recently that I believe all students come to school to learn. Nobody wants to achieve less than their personal best. To make sure you do this, we have to maintain our focus on ‘getting the basics right.’ The most successful businesses, companies, sports teams and individuals all get the basics right which means doing simple things consistently. At MRC we insist that you: produce your best work all the time, present your work well, work your hardest, have excellent behaviour, are on time to lessons, are polite and wear your uniform properly. You must also be proud when you do well and respect others. It is essential that we maintain a focus on these very simple things – you will not achieve your best otherwise. Most of you get these right all the time, but we can and must all do more and challenge ourselves to be the best we can be every lesson, every day.

 Working on Hegartymaths falls into the ‘basics’ category above. As you know, you are set Hegartymaths tasks to complete every week. I think this is a brilliant website, which helps you to learn and embed maths skills, which you will definitely need for your GCSEs. There is also a league table of Heagartymaths usage within United Learning. We are steadily improving in this table, but are still some way behind the schools at the top. At the moment, we are averaging 7.5 hours per student; in the top performing schools the students have completed an average of 21 hours each! You are all set tasks to do every week and it is essential that you complete them. I am sure you will all want our College to be ‘up there’ with the very best in group and we have some catching up to so – we need a real push on this and we all have a part to play.

 I think we also need to make some changes to our use of inside spaces at break and lunchtime. We have over 1000 students in the College, but can only seat 312 students in our canteen. Some students are having to eat standing up, as we don’t have enough space. I would like to repeat what we did last year, which was to ask students who have finished eating to leave the canteen to allow others to sit down to eat; I am sure you will all agree this is fair – it is not easy to eat while standing. Please can we also make every effort to keep the school tidy. A very small minority of you sometimes let yourselves down in relation to this. It is not appropriate to drop litter anywhere in the College, or in the wider community outside – you must tidy up after yourselves – this is very important.

 Have a good week everyone – no sports results this week. We’ll be back to normal next week.