This week’s theme is ‘New Beginnings’ with all students enjoying Mr Turner’s assembly which looked at the everyone having a positive and successful year ahead. We all particularly enjoyed sharing in the excitement of last year’s GCSE students receiving their fantastic results and listing to some key pieces of advice.

The humanities and social sciences faculty have also had lots of positive new beginnings to celebrate.

We have welcomed a new member of staff, Mr Sylvester, to the faculty to teacher geography and some history. The RE department has introduced a new curriculum for key stage 3 and the faculty, for the first time in thirty years, has no Mr Newbold, after he retired at the end of last year. Of course, the most important new beginning is new classes. The faculty welcomes all students back for a new year but especially all year 7s to BMS and to enjoying their history, geography and RE lessons, along with all the year 10s and 12s who have opted to study either a humanity or social sciences.

In Ms Dunsby’s first year 12 lesson, students enjoyed drawing maps of sediment cells but only after playing a memory game to provide a foundation for this initial learning.

Mr Monk’s new year 12 politics students started off with the question, ‘What is Politics?’ and had a lively discussion about all the Parliamentary happenings over the summer.

Another new beginning to celebrate is the joining of Childcare to our faculty from D&T. Sophie Ward and Chloe Harrop, two new year 12s, have written about one of their first lessons:

“In today’s childcare lesson, we learnt how the practitioner can support children’s development. Looking at cognitive development, we all chose a toy and spoke about how it could help with memory, concentration, imagination and creativity.”

The RE department were busy with expectation contracts before turning to discussions about different world religions.

In Ms Brown’s RE class, all the new year 7s listened attentively and with excitement to details about the first topic.

In the classroom next door, though, Mrs Al Rubai was teaching year 10 their first GCSE sociology lesson, with students ensuring the very first page of their books were pristine and demonstrating to their teacher that they all are aiming to always produce their very best work.

Finally, Mr Lyley welcomed his new history GCSE class who started immediately looking at the start of WW2.

Year 10 students made an excellent start to Business Studies lessons with Mr Malik. They were learning about the dynamic nature of business using Kahoot!

Year 12 students also hit the ground running, learning about the fundamentals of business.

It has been an interesting first week for all classes across the humanities and social sciences faculty. We are all looking forward to seeing all students flourish, thrive and achieve their very best in the 2021-22 academic year.