MLP Newsletter No. 30
Welcome to the new academic year – and a very special welcome to all those of you who are new
to membership of Magna Learning Partnership. That includes all children and young people beginning their education at one of our academies, staff either starting their career or continuing their careers and you as parents/carers of sons and daughters learning with us. We also offer a very special welcome to the children, staff and parents of Old Sarum Primary School who join us today.
If you’ve been counting, you would have assumed that Old Sarum becomes our tenth academy in the Trust. In fact, that’s not the case – we remain as nine owing to another momentous event taking place today. Officially, Wyvern College and St Edmund’s Girls’ School become one. The application to the Department for Education was approved, the legal process has now concluded and we welcome the new Wyvern St Edmund’s Academy to MLP.
For the final time, we are celebrating GCSE results from Wyvern and from St Edmund’s as separate groups as the amalgamation means that boys and girls results will be counted together from next year. We congratulate young people at those schools, as well as at Sarum Academy and at The Trafalgar School. Thursday, 25th August was a very special day for so many young people who have worked so hard for their results; it was marvellous to hear the great news from all our secondary schools. A week earlier, S6C and Sarum Academy welcomed their leavers back in to collect their A Level and Level 3 Vocational results. There are now many young people preparing to go to university this month, take up an apprenticeship or enter the world of work; congratulations to everyone who has achieved so brilliantly through a tough two years of education in the pandemic. We must also congratulate our Year 6s with their SATS results. They were the first group to sit these tests since 2019 and again, had to battle with the challenges of learning through Covid. Well done to them and to all the staff who supported the children. Enabling a world of freedom, opportunity and fulfilment
A new year inevitably sees some change; at the end of last term we said farewell and thank you to
a number of long standing staff members in our Trust, including Mrs Nicola Bull, Director of Education and formerly Head of Wyvern St Edmund’s. We wish all our staff leavers the very best in their new roles and new phases of their lives. We hope they will keep in contact with us and let us know how they are getting on – and of course, as one of the largest employers in the area, we are getting a bit of a track record in recruiting staff back in after a few years’ experience elsewhere.
Also, as a Trust, opportunities for staff to move from one academy to another arise quite frequently. Mrs Louise Henderson, having led S6C for the past eighteen months, now becomes Headteacher at Wyvern St Edmund’s. Mr Ben Hillier joins us from Shaftesbury School to be Head of College at S6C. We wish them all the very best for this academic year.
We are hoping that 2022-3 will be a year free from the disruption that Covid has brought to education since March 2020. Certainly, the focus on wider activities, trips and extra-curricular experiences in this newsletter gives a good indication of how much ‘normality’ we have been able to resume over the last term. We want that to continue and we want to ensure that all our children and young people attend school every day so that they can really benefit from the great teaching in our academies. Here’s to a happy and successful academic year ahead.
Sarah Busby
Chief Executive Officer