I think it is fair to say that Autumn has properly arrived this week as we have returned to school after the half-term break but that is fine and to be celebrated as we pick up the pace of a busy term ahead.

And it certainly has been a busy week with a huge amount going on in school. Before this week over the half-term holiday we had a group of students from Years 11 and 13 in Italy visiting Pompeii, Sorrento and the island of Capri and they had a fantastic time. On Tuesday and Wednesday our Year 13 drama students performed Accidental Death of an Anarchist and it was excellent. Meanwhile sport rolls on with practices and fixtures in the mud, the wind and the rain. I walked around the school on Wednesday just after the end of the school day and saw mock trial preparation for students in Years 8 and 9, an evenly balanced 1^st XV Rugby match against King Alfred’s, a fantastic Year 11 GCSE English revision session on “An Inspector Calls” and, as ever, the Bigg Band played on in the Hall and sounded great. House activities for the term kick off with House Mastermind on today.  In addition, the work of Sixth Form ambassadors in lessons starts this week with Year 12 students helping out and supporting in classes across the curriculum. A busy school is a happy school and it is certainly the case.

Looking ahead to next week, we are currently selling poppies in school and hope that students will make a £1 donation to support the Royal British Legion; donations can also be made at our Just Giving page. We will be marking Remembrance Day in school on Friday 10^th November with a minute’s silence and a playing of the last post.

Finally, some families may have seen the DfE’s schools’ performance tables being released just before the half-term break with unvalidated Key Stage 4 data for 2023. As a school, we don’t pay a huge amount of attention to rankings – education shouldn’t be a competition – but we were pleased to again be in the top half a dozen of highest performing schools in the county and the top 15% nationally for progress. We don’t need this metric – a Progress 8 score of 0.52, officially “Well Above Average” – to tell us that our students achieve very well indeed, experience great teaching and learning, have excellent pastoral care, and thrive at Wallingford School – we can see it all around us in our busy, happy, high-achieving school community.