Dear Parents and Carers,
I hope that you are enjoying the end of the week warmth, the weather is certainly brightening up a bit.
When I Grow Up Day on 21st May 2025 – we need your help!
Can you offer some time to come and speak to some classes about your job (current or past)? We are looking for family members who can do a brief talk about their career, to inspire and open up possibilities for our children. Are you a builder, brain surgeon, social worker, musician, hairdresser, lawyer, designer, nurse, volunteer, IT developer or a lion tamer?! Do you own your own business, do you volunteer, what special skill do you have? Do you have a former St Mary’s pupil who would like to share their educational journey, once they have left school? Whatever you do, we want to hear from you! If you are able to offer some time, please email swalker@stmarysn8.co.uk to volunteer.
E–Safety Workshops (for parents and carers only) – Thursday 27th March
Regularly, parents and carers talk to staff about children’s internet use, what they are exposed to, bullying online and the general challenges of keeping children safe and monitoring their use. We teach the children about E-Safety in school and but now we have a lesson for parents and carers. This is an extremely important topic and we want to help you to make the right the choices for your children by sharing information. We are hopeful that many of you will attend this meeting to find out more about E-Safety and therefore are running two sessions, one at 9.00am and one at 5.00pm. Due to the sensitive nature of some of the topics, this event is for parents and carers only. We hope to see you there.
Term dates for 2025 – 2026
We have just published next year’s term dates (see below in For Your Information or or take a paper copy from the office). This allows you to plan holidays in advance to get the best deals, as we know the trips in the school holidays are expensive. We are trying all we can to improve outcomes for our young people, and one way of doing this is to ensure that they are in school as much as possible. Take a look at the chart below that demonstrates how absences from school mount up significantly over a 5-year period and how much learning is lost.
The goal is that your child has the minimum 96% attendance by the end of the academic year. We realise that children get poorly and sometimes there are family bereavements and suchlike, that of course are unavoidable. However, during the rest of the academic year, we ask that you do all that you can to get your child into school as there is a direct correlation between children’s attendance at school and outcomes in life.
Royal Albert Hall Concert
What an amazing opportunity for children at St Mary’s and across the borough, to perform at the Royal Albert Hall. The children were amazing, sounded fantastic, behaved impeccably and made us all proud. Thank you to the adults who worked hard to make this happen, particularly our specialist music teacher Mrs Peacock. A big thank you to all of the parents and family members who went to watch and cheer the children on, we hope you enjoyed it too.
Easter Events
Easter is approaching fast. Please join us on our Easter Procession Donkey Day on Wednesday 2nd April where the children from Church Lane process along Hornsey High Street behind the donkey, waving their palm leaves. It is a sight to be seen! Also note the Easter Craft Fair on Saturday 29th March, please come along for the Easter Egg Hunt (11am-1pm) and have a look at the Crouch End Craft Fair stalls (11am-4pm). Hornsey Church Tower is also open for tours.
Big Walk & Wheel Fortnight
The Big Walk and Wheel Fortnight starts on Monday 24th March and runs for two weeks. Please join in by walking or wheeling your way to school. If you can’t manage the whole journey, then please try to take part for some of it, maybe getting off the bus one stop earlier to walk the rest of the journey. The aim of this is to encourage physical exercise whilst also having a positive impact on the environment for those that swap their cars for walking, cycling or scootering. Ask your children what they talked about in assembly.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Best wishes
Jane O’Brien
Headteacher
