For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun! .....Mary Poppins on World Book Day.

For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.  You find the fun and ‘SNAP!’ the job's a game!  I wouldn’t exactly call Headship a ‘game’ but some days it is certainly good fun!

Headmistress arrives for World Book Day

Sometimes we all need a bit of magic and my thanks to the office at St. Peter's for brilliantly making magic on these photographs of Mary Poppins arriving at St. Peter’s for World Book Day.  It was a wonderful turn-out - thank you to the staff, the children and all the parents behind the scenes who helped make it such a magical day.  

Well done also to those pupils this week who performed at Devon Performing Arts competition - St. Peter’s children had huge successes and many thanks and congratulations to the music department as a whole for enabling the children to do so well.  More details next week.

We have now confirmation on our 11+ Scholars for Years 7 and 8 at St. Peter’s next year.  I am extremely proud of them. They have worked extremely hard to great success.   Well done - I look forward to awarding them their badges at Speech Day next term. And also a well done to the pupils who gained successful entry to local grammar schools.  A real achievement for them and St. Peter’s.  

Exceptional teaching and inspirational teachers.  

I’m over halfway through my first year as Head of St. Peter’s and, reviewing the excellent feedback and ideas brought about by the various surveys taken at the beginning of this term and building a clear vision and development plan with the whole school community takes up much of  my time, but I also very much enjoy meeting parents and, the best part of all, spending time with the children and in classrooms.  It is these which make it most clear the central core value of St. Peter’s which the whole vision and plan will build around and that is exceptional teaching and inspirational teachers.  

On listening to parents and the children, observing the teachers with the children and seeing the patience, kindness and time that they take to make sure that each individual child is happy and making rapid and clear progress is formidable.  Their ability to nip any inevitable issues in the bud means that problems do not escalate as they can in some schools.  The exciting, challenging lessons and variety of independent individual projects and tasks means that children are so challenged with an ambitious and varied curriculum that one parent said to me that her son had learnt more within six months with us in year 7 than her other son had learnt in the whole of his Common Entrance and scholarship course at another prep school.  Another parent spoke of St. Peter’s creating such a culture of enthusiasm for learning in her Year 8 daughter who has blossomed from a shy uninvolved child when she joined us in year 6 to a confident, knowledgeable individual ready to take on the future! Exceptional teaching and inspirational teachers are absolutely the most important thing in a school.  The rest is of course important, the provision of the all-round education, the culture, the space, the results, the sport, the music, the friendships, but the core - the foundation and the central part has to be the teaching and teachers. From what I can see, from what I hear and from what I know - at St. Peter’s that is what we have got right.