Neville Coles – CEO

Term 1 update to parents / carers

Welcome to Term 1 – September 2021 -22.

Once again thank you for all your great support during recent times; it has not been an easy period for any of us. This school year will be more ‘normal’. All our schools within our Trust are in a very good place to thrive.

The start of term has gone very well and all staff and students are buoyant. Dare I say they are happy to be back! In our secondary schools we welcomed 300 new students to PCSA, 270 to WCSA and 233 to TKASA. These are excellent numbers and sit alongside the 100 Year 12s (lower sixth) students that entered our Sixth Form at TKASA – making a Sixth Form of 200+. This year we sent five of our students to Oxbridge. This is really remarkable – a doubling of our Sixth Form numbers in the last two years. We also have welcomed another 37 graduate trainee teachers into TPLT. We will again train these into first rate teachers to teach your children in our schools in WSM and Highbridge – 25 secondary colleagues and 12 primary colleagues have joined us. Our Training School continues to flourish.

I know our superb Principals will communicate through their own newsletters – either weekly or termly – so I will keep this short. We have big plans in 2021-22 especially in terms of developing some alternative provision centres in WSM and Highbridge. We also will be relocating Priory Pre-School to our Castle Batch site as a ‘Little Learner’ centre – both these developments will greatly assist our communities and allow even more students to succeed. We also have plans to issue laptops to all new Y7 students joining our Trust in the not too distance future – possibly as early as September 2022 – this will assist in bridging the ‘digital divide’. We have now ‘pooled’ all our resources as one Trust. We remain in a very strong position both educationally and financially.

Please do contact me at any time with anything of note. My email is Neville.coles@theplt.org.uk.

We will continue to place students first, cherish our staff and serve our communities

Neville Coles

CEO - The Priory Learning Trust