Consultation on the Times of the School Day
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8th March 2023
Dear Parents and Carers,
Re: Consultation to Change the Times of the School Day from 1st September 2023.
We are currently undertaking a consultation process to make permanent changes to the times of the school day. It remains the government’s expectation that all schools will move to 32.5 hours from 1st September 2023. As a result we will need to extend our academy day by adding either 10mins to tutor time every day or, put an extra tutor time lesson of 50 minutes once every week.
We propose one of the following two models:
Model A
Start time remains the same
We add 10 minutes to our morning tutor period for reading
The break and lunch social time duration remains the same but timings change slightly
The end of the school day will be 3:10
Model B
Start times remain the same as currently every day
We introduce a period 7, every Monday which lasts 50 minutes
The end time on a Monday is 3:50
Tues-Friday remain the same as at present
As a school, we believe that either of these changes will be beneficial to the school community and will have a positive effect on our children’s education. Our academy priority to enrich vocabulary, develop oracy and encourage a love of reading will be positively impacted upon. The intention is to use the extra time to extend our Reading Aloud project daily or in one extended tutor time session.
As you know we have spent a great deal of time, professional development activities and resources investing in developing a love of reading and oracy. We have introduced narrowing the vocabulary gap strategies in all classrooms and are proud to be a Voice 21 Black Country hub academy for oracy. Recently we purchased the Bedrock vocabulary building tool, a reading book for every student in Year 7, introduced our successful Reading Aloud project in tutor time and have seen library loans double since the end of the pandemic. We are proud that 2022 outcomes show that progress in English is extremely high standardised scores for spelling, grammar and comprehension in KS3 are well above national.
We appreciate that these changes may affect you. For this reason, we would like to invite you to give your feedback by sharing your responses via this online form: https://forms.office.com/e/N222aMFRHb as soon as you are ready and no later than 5pm on Friday 14th April 2023.
We will release the results of the consultation by the end of week commencing 1st May 2023, with details being posted to the school website (www.georgesalter.com).
Yours faithfully,
Adrian Price
Principal
George Salter Academy
