Keep up to date with all the latest news happening in school at the moment.

• Poppies for sale

  Tue 05 Nov 2019

  We will be selling poppies at school from Wednesday 6th November. 

   

  Children need to bring their donations to school and will get an opportunity to purchase a poppy from our year six pupils at lunchtimes. We suggest a donation of at least 20p for a poppy. 

   

  Other items will also be for sale and pictures are enclosed with their suggested price. 

   

  On Monday 11th we will be having a two minute silence at 11am.

  

• PTFA update

  Wed 23 Oct 2019

  Many thanks for your support and two recent PTFA events. 

   

  The Back to Cool disco raised £620

  The uniform sale at the recent parent evenings raised £147

   

  At the PTFA meeting on 22.10.19 at the Greyhound the team considered ways that they wanted to spend this and look forward to sharing their ideas soon. 

• Scooter park update - thankyou

  Thu 17 Oct 2019

  Many thanks to CDM Artificial Grass who have helped us today by coming to fit some artificial grass, free of charge, to the entrance of our scooter park. 

  As you can see below, children were very excited this afternoon when they were able to pick their scooters up without getting muddy. 

   

  

• Harvest festival - 24th October

  Mon 14 Oct 2019

  All children from year one to year six will be walking to St. Peter's church on Thursday 24th October for our harvest service. 

  If you are able to help walk the children safely please let your child's class teacher know as soon as possible. We will be leaving school at about 9.30am and arrive back at school just before 11am. 

  The service will be led by year 6 children and will start at about 10am once all the children have arrived. 

   

• PSHE workshop postponed

  Tue 01 Oct 2019

  We have had to move the PSHE work shop that we had planned for October 8th to December 10th. 

  We apologise for this, however, we have not had some of the resources that we want to share with parents come into school yet.

  A letter will be coming home from Mrs. Girling confirming the new date and providing information about the workshop and how we hope that parents will find it useful to see how we are going to be teaching relationship and growing up aspects of PSHE to children in the summer term. 

• Scooter park - help needed

  Tue 01 Oct 2019

  Unfortunately the heavy rain means that the small piece of grass that children cross on the way to the scooter park has become very muddy.

  We hoped that the grass was going to act as a natural 'speed bump' and help prevent children scooting around the corner, which it is doing successfully, but the rain is now making it difficult to access the scooter park. 

  We are going to explore putting down some grass strengthening matting down to help as soon as possible. 

  However, until then if any one has a couple of unused paving slabs that we could use to help keep shoes clean we would appreciate borrowing so that we can bridge the gap from pavement to scooter park.

  Please ring the school office if you can help - Many thanks.

• New policies

  Fri 27 Sep 2019

  At the governor meeting last night, Thursday 27^th Sept, several policies were updated. All of our polices are regularly reviewed but the first meeting of the year for governors in September is one of the meetings when annual reviews take place.

   

  There are ten updated and reviewed polices on the website, however, there were a couple of polices that are frequently read by parents that we would like to draw your attention to. All policies can be found on our web site – CLICK HERE.

   

  Attendance and authorised leave of absence. CLICK HERE.

  Some updates to this policy include -

  • An updated Exceptional Leave of Absence request form and some information about the issuing of penalties for parents that take children out of school for unauthorised reasons, for example a family holiday.
  • Ensuring that children attend school regularly and that parents are aware of how we encourage good attendance and how we hold parents to account if children’s attendance falls below 90%

   

  Behaviour policy. CLICK HERE.

  Some updates to this policy include -

  • In 2018 we introduced a governor award. We ran this for a second time in 2019. We have now added this highest level of good behaviour award to our policy to ensure that it continues successfully. One child from each class is awarded the governor award at the final assembly of the year in July. Parents are invited ‘in secret’ to the assembly so that they can be part of our final celebration assembly of the year and see their child get their certificate from members of the governing body.
  • We are letting parents know that their child has been sent to a senior teacher on the first occasion with an updated ‘sorry slip’ that will be sent home so that school and family can continue to work together to help encourage and support good behaviour. Sorry slips used to stay in school. This is after feedback from parents that they wished to be informed as soon as possible if their child has been seen by another teacher and we hope that it helps.
  • If children are sent to the headteacher they will now miss the Friday afternoon playtime of that week and spend it with him in detention. Children used to miss golden time if they were sent to the headteacher, however, this could be up to seven weeks later, which was too long. Therefore, Mr. Averis will now have a weekly Friday detention during afternoon break. Please be aware that we normally only have one or two children that get sent to Mr. Averis for poor behaviour choices a half term. We know that over 99% of behaviour at St. John’s is good and that this last deterrent is only needed to help a very small number of children make more appropriate behaviour choices.

• Y2 walk postponed

  Tue 24 Sep 2019

  The year two walk around Belper this afternoon - Tuesday 24th Sept, has been postponed due to the weather. 

   

  We will publish a new date as soon as possible. 

• Learn an instrument at school

  Wed 18 Sep 2019

  Do you want to learn a musical instrument?

   

  We offer weekly music lessons with a range of trained music teachers. Weekly music lessons are available for the following instruments; flute, clarinet, saxophone, guitar, trumpet, cornet, trombone, violin, viola and voice. 

  If you would like to find out more about these weekly music lessons please ask your child to go to see Mrs. Garbutt, our music lead teacher, who will be able to give them a letter with more information. 

  Mrs. Garbutt works in year one on Thursdays and Fridays. 

   

  This does not impact on our year four weekly music lessons. 

  All children in year four at St. John's have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument. All children are loaned an instrument for the year and have a weekly music lesson with a trained music teacher. This is free to parents. This year, 2019/20, all year four children are learning brass instruments. 

• PTFA dates and facebook

  Thu 12 Sep 2019

  Many thanks to all the parents that came to support the school at our PTFA meeting last night. Special thanks to Nicky who is our new chair for the year. 

   

  We were able to add some new dates to the diary that can be found on the school calendar CLICK HERE. 

   

  School Disco - Thursday 3rd October 2019

  Next PTFA meeting - 8pm Tuesday 22nd October 2019 at the Greyhound

  Christmas Fayre - Thursday 28th November 2019

  Christmas Movie night - Tuesday 3rd December 2019

  Christmas Disco - Thursday 19th December 2019

  Spring Disco - Thursday 13th February 2020 

  Family chocolate bingo - Friday 27th March 2020

   

  All new (and existing) parents are invited to join the PTFA's facebook page. This page is managed by the PTFA to help parents keep up to date with what is happening at school. Parents that wish to request to have access to the page need to CLICK HERE. 

  Please note that the facebook page is managed and maintained by parent volunteers and information shared on it about St. John's may not reflect the views and opinions of the school. 

   

  Finally any parents that want to contact the PTFA to offer any time, support or suggestions are able to do so through their page on the school website. CLICK HERE.