What an amazing end to a very positive week, a big well done to this week’s students who were nominated for ‘Celebration Friday’. Students from all year groups met with Headteacher Kerry Payne for a tasty pastry for all their hard work, dedication and perseverance …
Thank you to everyone who visited our school as part of opening evening this week. We loved welcoming our prospective future students and their families. Here is a favour of what Brune Park got up to that evening.
Brune Park is a vibrant and energising place to be; we are a school community united by positivity and belief – in each other and in the potential of our school to be truly great. Through the last year, our community spirit been more evident and possibly more important than ever before, and for so many of us what we will look back on when we reflect on the Global Pandemic, will be our strength together. The ‘Staying Connected’ strategy has come to symbolise who we are and what we are about as a GFM community at Brune Park.
Through the first lockdown we learned how to keep in frequent contact, how to ‘stay connected’ when we weren’t physically together – we focused on looking after each other’s well being, as we found our way through how to support learning remotely and online.
Some of our fondest memories of lockdown one were safely delivering 100s of book boxes to students in their home – put together by our dedicated teams of staff, making sure they were safe, building resource boxes to support learning across the subjects, trying to deliver an online curriculum as well as setting up online access in student’s homes. Every Tutor tried everything to reach each of their tutees at least once a week and the variety and breadth of ways to connect became a feature of everything we were doing.
By September we were so happy to be back together again, however unusual school and learning onsite felt! We had our fair share of challenges with bubble closures, trying to secure more devices for students who found themselves at home, creative ways of making sure everyone had quality learning whether they were in school or isolating at home. ‘Staying Connected’ was as important for those self isolating or affected by bubble closures and we started to make good progress with how we were managing remote and online learning.
By lockdown two we had systems and structures in place to provide a full online timetable, a wide range of onsite education for different groups of students and families, and were making even more progress in getting devices to families who didn’t yet have them. ‘Staying connected’ sharply focused on supporting students access their online or onsite learning, engaging in online clubs and societies, we continued to safely put together and deliver book boxes, kept a focus on reading and oracy, and started delivering specialist equipment for art and design, food and technology.
Throughout lockdown our ethos and values have remained resolute: we want everyone to be happy and to be successful (with a broad definition of success.) We support and enable all to strive to be the best that they can be, so our expectations of students and staff have remained relentlessly high, different in places, but relentlessly high.
What characterised us as staff prior to covid, has shone through over the last year! We enjoy working with young people and relish in the challenges of trying to support and enable students to be the best they can be – adapting to how we could and can do this remotely we think has strengthened mutually supportive and respectful relationships even more. We have remained positive, motivated and driven; we are honest in our reflections, and have embraced the challenges we face. We used to say that in an educational world where much is challenging, and much can be negative we are resolute in being positive – we have modelled this through the global pandemic; committing to being there for the young people, their families and for each other – finding ways to secure the highest possible quality of learning and support remotely, online and onsite, doing so safely and with the same high expectations. We have celebrated and valued our ‘togetherness’ for the past three years but never more so than this past year.
We were pleased to welcome the Ofsted inspecting team at the start of 2020, to have our progress recognised and our direction validated. We remain restless in wanting to hasten to where we want and need to be: we want every young person to succeed beyond where they may not ever have thought possible, to believe in themselves and what they can achieve. Through a fantastic school experience that now formally includes online learning, we want our young people to grow to love and value learning, develop as well rounded, thoughtful and empathetic adults, to be successful in achieving strong qualifications so they have ‘open doors’ to post 16 study and employment. We want every young person to feel the positivity and be driven to believe in themselves, in the school and in Gosport. We want every parent and carer to feel part of their child’s positive school experience, to feel confident and comfortable to work in partnership with the school.
We want everyone in the GFM Brune Park community to be proud to be ‘GFM Brune Park.’
Our improvement priorities are clear: improving the quality of teaching, and the student experience of learning and progress – in the classroom and beyond.
We hope you find our website helpful and informative, and that it gives you a flavour of what makes this GFM school so positive, so driven and therefore so special.
