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Year 7 and Year 9 students at the Hollins have received their pen pal letters all the way from Dijon, France! Our pupils were over the moon to learn more about their penpals and life in France.

It turns out that our French friends don’t wear school uniforms, which was quite a shock for some of our students…and while snails and frogs’ legs might be a typical French dish, their pen pals have explained that it’s not something they eat all the time. It’s been an incredible cultural exchange, and our pupils have learned so much!

We can’t wait to see what the pen pal programme at The Hollins has in store for our students.

We say a sad but fond farewell to our Business Manager, Lynn White who is retiring from Huncoat Primary School in Accrington after 34 years.

During her time at the school, Mrs White has served the children, parents, staff and community with the upmost love and care, tending to many of our pupils’ bumped heads and grazed knees.

Mrs White has created a wonderful relationship with all staff, governors, children and families and will be truly missed by all. Her hard work and devotion to the school has been greatly valued. The staff within Huncoat Primary School and the LET Education Trust are not just losing great colleague, but most importantly a great friend.

She will be greatly missed by all of the school, and we wish her all the best in her retirement.

Goodbye and good luck Mrs White – thank you for all of your service.

Last term, almost 40 pupils applied for the pupil librarian post, which is fantastic! A huge congratulations to the 15 pupils who were successful. Your hard work and dedication to this opportunity is greatly appreciated.

We are proud to have such capable and enthusiastic candidates in our school community who are going to make the library a more exciting and vibrant place to be. They have been trained up and are ready to go with their new role this week.

Rachel Ashworth, a Teaching Assistant at Rhyddings, has been awarded National Runner-Up at the Best Secondary HLTA Awards by the Best Practice Network.

Rachel was nominated by Andrew Williams, Headteacher at Rhyddings, for her dedication to both the pupils and the school. Mr Williams said “Rachel has undertaken extensive Continued Professional Development to support and improve her practice.”

Rachel has successfully run the Rhyddings’ HUB and nurture provision; providing excellent one-to-one support as well as specialist programmes and sessions for pupils.

Headteacher, Andrew Williams, says: “Rachel is a caring, compassionate, calm and effective professional who supports both pupils and staff alike. Rachel’s work is often focussed on the most vulnerable pupils or those that just need that bit of extra support on their learning journey. She is highly regarded and most deserving of this award and the national recognition of her achievements and contribution at Rhyddings. We also want to thank Best Practice Network for acknowledging Rachel’s invaluable contribution to the success of our school.”

From everybody within the LET Education Trust, we want to congratulate Rachel on her fantastic achievement and thank her for her dedication to Rhyddings, the pupils and their learning journeys.

 

As part of the final week of term, Huncoat Primary School pupils participated in a wide variety of festive activities.

Pupils were lucky enough to meet Father Christmas, wear Christmas jumpers, play in the snow and have a Christmas dinner.

To finalise the end of term,  parents from Huncoat Primary School were invited to the EYFS Sing-a-long, KS1 Carol Service, and KS2’s Traditional Carol Service to celebrate the pupils hard work and dedication to learning.

Welcome to the termly newsletter from The Rhyddings.

 

 

A huge congratulations to Year 11 pupil, Rhianna, who has secured a place at the ‘Northern Ballet School,’ in Manchester to study a Level 6 Diploma in Professional Dance. The’ Northern Ballet School’ takes people from all over the world each year and this is an amazing achievement.

We wish you all the success in the future Rhianna, Well done!

Early in 2022 the Hollins was asked to partner with iQuila, a software company, to develop a safe way for pupils to access their school folders when working from home.

This work, led by David Hazari, the LET Education Trust IT Strategy Lead, took a number of months to complete but eventually, the school ended up with an end-to-end encrypted system for every child who wanted access to their work stored in the data centre. This meant that accessing the school system was totally safe and because all the school filtering and security software was part of this, pupils were kept safe while online. This system is now implemented in two of our LET school with the third and fourth about to come onboard and has been hugely beneficial in terms of accessibility, online safety and security for pupils.

This work led to iQuila being nominated for the Digital Transformation Company of the Year, for the project at the Hollins, at the SDC awards in London. The SDC Awards are a long-standing award ceremony focused on the achievements of organisations of all sizes across Storage, Digitization and Cloud. Some of the companies nominated were Global enterprises and others, rising SMEs. iQuila were runners-up in the Digital Transformation Company of the Year category but also went on to win the Software-as-a-Service Innovation of the Year.

The Let’s Be Foundation at The Hollins have been busy spreading happiness and kindness in Burnley Town Centre. During their time, the team of inspirational students served 59 cups of tea and coffee and distributed 6 winter packs full of thermal goods to help people in the winter months.

The volunteers saw the true impact of kindness spreading kindness. A local charity ‘Depher’ were inspired by the students’ actions and their positive actions. As a result, each of the volunteers received a small gift and a £25 Asda voucher.

Earlier this year, pupils, staff, and parents from The Hollins were delighted to discover that they had been nominated for 3 awards at the Annual Educate Awards.  

Last week, representatives from the school attended the event at Liverpool Cathedral. We are pleased to announce that The Hollins won ‘Outstanding Arts in School’ and were placed runner-up for the ‘Most Inspirational Secondary School award’. 

Mrs Haydock, headteacher,  said “We are delighted to have been awarded winner of “Outstanding Arts in School” award at the recent North-West Educate Awards 2022. In addition, we were named runner-up as “Most Inspirational Secondary School” and were nominated for the “Community Partnership Award”. Many pupils and staff have been involved with the numerous projects that Waqar and his army of pupils have carried out over the past year and these accolades are a fitting tribute to all that hard work. The event was simply amazing, and we were all totally in awe of the splendour of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral.  

 “We took some of our pupils who have been involved with the projects with us to celebrate and they thoroughly enjoyed the event and the opportunity to reflect on their achievements over the past year. I am incredibly proud of our school community and the difference we have made in our corner of the world. 

Everybody at the LET Education Trust is exceptionally proud of the recent awards for the Hollins and we are delighted to hear that the school and pupils are being recognised for their efforts.