Newsletter 10 January 2025

Dear Parents/ Carers

Happy New Year! It has been great to welcome everyone back this week after the festival break as we start the Spring term.

Staffing update

This week has seen the return of Mr Daly after his secondment to Ernulf Academy. It also ties in nicely to the beginning of Ms Panter’s promotion to an associate assistant principal role at the Ernulf Academy for the remainder of the academic year. Students may, however, see Mrs Panter when she pops in each Monday to continue teaching her Year 13 English Literature students. During this period, I am pleased to announce that Miss Campbell will be stepping up as the acting Head of English.

PAC meeting

The minutes of the last Parent Advisory Council on 20 November 2024 can be found here: PAC Minutes 20241120. The next PAC meeting will be held on Wednesday 22 January 2025. If there is anything you would like to pass on, please feel free to use the pac@astreastivo.org email address.

Exam preparation

The second mock series for Year 11 and 13 students is almost upon us – starting Monday 27 January 2025. As such, homework expectations and exam preparation in lessons will start to increase now as we move towards the real exams. As a rough guide, students should be completing approximately two hours of homework and/ or personal revision per weekday. Option subjects will likely be setting approximately an hour and a half per week, depending on the subject needs. However, I thought it would be useful for Year 11 parents and carers to know exactly what will be set in the core subjects going forward:

Homework

English

• Complete a English literature past paper (or combination of past paper questions) weekly (60 minutes for all students)
• 15-minute fortnightly fluency quiz set on Carousel (following the link from your teacher)

Mathematics

• Complete a past paper once a fortnight (90 minutes for all students)
• 90 minutes of Sparx Maths per week
• As we get closer to the real exams, the Sparx Maths will be reduced to once per fortnight and the past papers will be set weekly

Science

• Complete exam questions or part of a past paper each week (45 minutes)
• 50 minutes of Sparx Science per week

We would encourage parents and carers, where possible, to supervise their children whilst completing their Sparx Maths and Science homework. Completed correctly, the Sparx system can really develop student understanding and performance, however, it is possible for students to use artifical intelligence (AI) systems via mobile phones to provide the answers, which defeats any gains. Thank you to the parents who have highlighted this, we thought it would be useful for others to know too.

Exam practice in lessons

As the teaching of content in core subjects comes to an end, our focus moves now to exam preparation and reviewing of topics that need work. This is how the exam preparation will be delivered in lessons:

English: Practicing exam paper questions for 20 minutes in every lesson, with in-class teacher feedback. The department calls this “Golden time” in case your child mentions it.

Mathematics: Students will start to complete a full exam paper every fortnight over the course of two lessons, with the third being used for feedback in the style of a “Walking, talking mock” where the teacher models how to answer some of the questions including their full thought process as they answer the questions.

Science: Formal exam practice in lessons will start after the February half term.

The rest of this week’s newsletter covers the Year 10 Parents’/ Carers’ evening, Year 9 vaccinations and finally the clubs on offer this term.

Yours faithfully

Tony Meneaugh

Principal

Year 10 Parents’/ Carers’ Evening

Parents’ evening will be held online on Thursday 23 January from 4.00pm-7.30pm.

Appointments can be booked via SchoolCloud – St Ivo Academy. Booking open on Monday 13 January at 6am. If you have any difficulties using the online platform, please contact the school office.

On the evening itself, please once again log on to School Cloud then click the “join video appointments” button. The system will then load your appointments, please see https://support.parentseveningsystem.co.uk/article/801-video-parents-how-to-attend-appointments-over-video-call for further information. You can use most phones, tablets, laptops etc to access this service. Please note that in order for the evening to run to time, calls will automatically cut off at the given end time (there will be a countdown on your screen).

Year 9 vaccinations

These take place on Monday 13 January. The MenDTP vaccination is being offered to all students, if you have not yet provided consent for or declined the vaccination please do so at https://imms.hct.nhs.uk/dtp/2024/cambsandpeterborough

To avoid any confusion and ensure students are supervised at all times, all students are to attend at the times indicated below. We will then check if they have consent from parents for the vaccination, if so they will wait for one of the nurses, if not return to lessons. Subject staff will accompany their group to the main hall.

To make the vaccination process easier, all Year 9 students should wear PE kit on Monday.

Spring term clubs