A strong start – welcome back

It’s Monday afternoon at the start of the new term and all staff are in school for a training day. It’s an essential time allowing colleagues to be ready to properly welcome our students back to school.

Just a reminder, we are looking forward to seeing all of Year seven and eleven students on Tuesday 2nd September, and the whole school back on Wednesday 3rd September. I hope that everyone has had a relaxing and enjoyable break and are ready for the academic year ahead.

Regular readers of this blog will know that there are two consistent themes to my messages home. One is the power of reading and how beneficial it is to all children, and the other is the importance of good attendance at school. On attendance, it’s been known for a couple of years now that making a strong start really does pay off. As this BBC article shows, students who are in every day at the start of the term are MUCH more likely to have good attendance all year, where as missing just one day in the first week more often than not leads to lower attendance across the year. It really is a case of starting as you mean to go on.

So, as we start the new term, I’ll urge all families to do their absolute best to encourage full attendance this week and next. It will make a huge difference longer term. As always, if you would like support in helping your child to get into good attendance habits then please get in touch with the relevant Head of Year.

Best wishes and here’s to a great 2025-2026 at MHS

Joe Barker

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