Well, a very warm welcome back to Medtia for the start of a new year. I would particularly like to welcome our new students and those parents and guardians who may be reading this blog for the first time. I hope that you all had a fantastic summer and are well rested. Through my weekly blog, I will keep you up to date each week with what we have been up to at college. We have regular updates from all of our pathways and we also have our ‘worker of the week’ and ‘a day in the life’ feature to give you a real insight into what we get up to!

Whilst we were all enjoying our holidays, there has been a lot of work carried out on our sites across the trust over the summer. For us, this includes a brand new ICT network and infrastructure and new iPads for every single student and staff member! Our ICT team have worked tirelessly over the summer to install a new faster and more reliable network for us, providing fast broadband for all of our staff and students. They have also installed over 800 computers across the trust and have programmed over 1500 iPads! So on behalf of all the staff and students here at Medtia, I would like to say a HUGE thank you to our incredible ICT and site teams for all of their hard work.

I am also absolutely thrilled to say that The Springboard Project is now open! Again, after a busy summer, the school officially opened on Wednesday and it is already so lovely to have the Springboard team on our campus. As part of that team we have a new shared Deputy Head across both sites, Mike Pidlyskyj, as well as a new team of curriculum leads. Our shared working and use of resources is going to add real value for our students.

On Monday and Tuesday, I had the privilege of working with our amazing staff team to train and prepare for the year ahead. On Tuesday we had an ‘away day’ at The Chill Factore where we spent the morning participating in a number of team building activities in the snow!

This was followed by a development afternoon with Mr Bright, the ICT advisor for the trust, to prepare for the roll out of iPads in the classroom.

Our students now all have their own iPad to use in class – an unbelievable resource for learning which has already made a huge impact. I am really excited to see how we can use the iPads to further engage our students and to enhance their learning. As always, we will keep you updated on our projects via this blog!

With a record number of students now based within our Medtia college campus, we welcomed a number of new staff this week and have planned a very busy term ahead! More students on work placements and internships than ever, new students getting to grips with commuting to Manchester for our Bridging the Gap programme at Manchester University and more new links for our pathways, including Activ8 spending a day a week at David Lloyd in Middleton! We are going up in the world and are very excited that our relationship continues to grow with David Lloyd, who have offered their sporting facilities to our students on a weekly basis!

We have had a great first few days back this week and all of our students have settled back in really well. Just a couple of things to remind you all:

• All students will receive student badges next week that must be worn daily.
• If students are independent travellers and want to go out at lunch, we must have written permission from parents/carers – letters have gone home
• On Friday afternoons, students have the choice of either going home at 12.30pm or staying for enrichment activities – please let us know your preference if you haven’t done so already.

Finally, I would just like to thank any parents and carers who drop their students off for your patience this week with the car park. It is very busy and we understand that sometimes you may have to wait for a space. We are doing everything that we can to free up more drop off spaces on the car park but understandably, with a new school opening next door and an increase in numbers, we are going to continue to be busy.

Have a wonderful weekend! Here’s hoping the weather clears up. I look forward to updating you on our activities during our first full week back in my next blog.

Daniel
Head of Key Stage 5 Pathways

You can view our previous blog entries here

News from the Learning Centre and New Bridge School can be found here

Click here for this week’s news from Graham