Our school council meet half termly to discuss a variety of issues which most recently included the topic of healthy eating. They discussed the food they eat at school and whether this was a healthy choice or not. Most children agreed they could do more to eat healthier – like choosing to eat the salad and vegetables provided in the dining room at lunch time or bringing a healthier snack to school.

In response to this, Miss Wase has created a healthy eating week initiative which will be next week. The week will kick off with an assembly and children will complete at least two healthy eating activities and the half term home learning will be based on healthy eating. This helps form part of our wider school objective in improving physical and mental wellbeing.

Parents may be aware that we are striving to ensure that we make the expensive business of raising children and sending them to school as affordable as possible. With this in mind, on Tuesday 4^th June, we have an advisor from the local authority visiting our school to help us audit and review our practices in order to maximise every opportunity to avoid economic exclusion. One of the activities they have asked us to do before they visit is to complete a parent survey. You will find details about this (and the link) in the letter below.

Abel Smith House,
1^st Floor West,
Gunnels Wood Road
Stevenage,
SG1 2ST

Friday 17^th May 2024

Dear Parents and Carers,

We are currently working with Almond Hill Junior School to understand how the rising financial pressures due to the cost-of-living crisis might be impacting on children’s learning and to try to ensure that pressure on household income doesn’t have a negative impact on any child’s education.

We are keen to understand how the culture at school impacts on children and any opportunities they experience throughout the school day.

We are speaking to school leaders, children, teachers and governors about things such as access to after school and lunchtime clubs, trips, music tuition, the cost of uniform, how free school meals are administered and how children access food during the school day. 

We will be in school on Tuesday 4^th June and it be great to get the views of as many parents as possible in advance of this. Therefore it would be really useful if you could fill in the questionnaire using the following link Almond Hill Junior School (office.com)

It would be great if you could complete the questionnaire by Friday 24th May.

Thank you for your support,

Carole Hinstridge

School Effectiveness Adviser
District Lead for Stevenage

I wanted to take the time to thank parents for their support when raising sponsorship for our recent athlete event. We raised £2459 from this event! This is incredible! I am blown away by the generosity and not just for this particular event. As a whole, we are extremely lucky to have families who support our events and help us to raise funds to improve our school – just like the recent sponsored read and government bake sales. Thank you all – your support does not go unnoticed.

You may have seen in the local media that a Stevenage school has got a pop-up pool set up to offer swimming lessons at school. I am pleased to tell parents that we too will be offering this from our playground. We will provide more details when we have a solid plan in place but we are really looking forward to offering this facility to children in the autumn term! Please don’t worry – the pool is heated!

Sadly, we had lots of ‘no shows’ at our sing-a-long this morning. If you are unsure if you have booked a space, please check your gateway payment history to ensure you have booked before arriving at school (or contact the school office and we can check for you). The remaining dates are full so please only come if you have booked a space.

A reminder of the dates:

Upper School – Friday 24th May
Lower School – Friday 14th June
Upper School – Friday 5th July

Please let us know if you can no longer attend so we can release the space for someone else.