Dear Members of the Landmark Community

The holiday season is here. We hope you’re having and looking forward to some relaxing and enjoyable times with family and friends. It has been another vibrant and successful term full of trips, events and celebrations.

New Developments

It was so exciting to welcome students back at the start of this term with a number of changes put in place to support our student body. Students arrived at a new entrance to the school site, accessing the building via a new side gate and arriving into a larger, more usable play space. The space consists of two sections, one for ball sports with a 3x3 basketball court and football pitch and the grassed area for relaxing on the benches, playing table tennis and participating in creative play. As the term has progressed it is really evident to see the benefits of this space to give our children more opportunities at lunch and break.

We made changes inside the school as well. Making our reception area more welcoming, creating a new servery for our lunches, improving the space for staff during their breaks, planning and marking time and developing a counselling space. Counselling has been an exciting addition to what we do to support student wellbeing at Landmark and we have been lucky to have our new student counsellor and wellbeing leader establish the processes, which enable us to deliver this service to our students.

Getting out and about!

The term has been packed full of exciting and engaging trips. This term Landmark students have travelled all over the south east to enhance their learning with year 7 and 8 furthering their understanding of Hinduism by visiting the Hindu Mandir in Peterborough to year 10 and 11 team building in London and supporting the music and PSHE curriculum through a theatre trip to Wicked! Students from the primary have been able to support their inquiry based learning through trips to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Fitzwilliam and a walking tour of the architecture of Cambridge.

There has been a range of trips to inspire our key stage four students as they look to the next steps in their education and potential careers, with students having the opportunity to participate in a diplomacy conference at Abbey College, heading out to Eddington to do geography field work and attend a physics at work workshop at the University. Whilst our key stage three students have continued on with their participation at the powerhouse games, learning about the importance of inclusion in sport, next term we'll be introducing this to our older primary students.

Community Events

At the start of term it was wonderful to welcome so many parents to the annual parent reception. It was a great opportunity for everyone to come and see the summer work that took place, with the movement of the playground to the rear of the school. With the improvements being made to the school this term we introduced open mornings enabling us to show our community to a wider audience. These have been attended by both current and potential families. We are most proud of how our students have engaged with visitors, through contributing to the presentations and showing around families.

We were delighted to introduce our first history day this term. This year we focused on the medieval period. Our year 10 students did a fantastic job of organising the day for our whole community, a really special part of the Landmark community is when we work together with both our primary and secondary school. Our history day is an exciting new addition to our annual calendar.

Our community deserves a big thank you for supporting learning in the school and this term as we had an array of parents come in and support our young learners in Robin class with their unit of inquiry. During the unit members of our community from a diverse range of professions including a genetic sequencer to mannequin designer, spoke about their jobs and answered questions from our learners.

We ended our term with two wonderful community events: the Festive Sing-a-long and the Fulbourn Winter Festival. As always Emma and Lue prepared our primary and secondary school choirs to deliver a wonderful performance for our whole community at the sing-a-long and it was wonderful to see so many families participating in the lantern parade at the winter festival. A big thank you to the PTA for supporting the Festive Sing-a-long with a range of delicious refreshments.

Fabulous Fundraising

A real highlight of this term has been the incredible service and action we have seen from our student body. There has been a real growth in the events organised by our students, which have involved collaboration skills, critical and creative thought to develop engaging activities and considerable effort to make the events a success. Our student council raised £432 for Children in Need, the council organised a wide range of activities to raise funds including a staff vs student dodgeball match, a fun run, a bake sale, a Pudsey hunt and guess the baby photo. The well thought through activities had the diversity to capture everyone's interests from our reception age children to our year 11 students to our staff. As a school we participated in the Fulbourn Community Remembrance Service. One of our year 11 students Ollie took action during this time collecting money for the Royal British Legion. His efforts raised £78.37. Fundraising was infectious at the school and Connie organised our annual Scholastic book fair, the four days of the fair were supported by a number of parents who gave their time to help. The fair raised £255 of book rewards which will go to further improve our excellent library provision.

Finally, the fundraising continued this week as our year 10 and 11 Level 2 Personal and Social Effectiveness groups organised a quite incredible Winter Wonder Landmark Fair and Disco. The festivities lasted for three hours and again there was something for everyone. Students had the opportunity to get their face painted, dress as a polar bear, decorate marshmallows, get dressed up for a photo booth and lots more, before dancing away at the disco. The group organised the event as part of their studies and were raising money for the Swift Conservation charity. Overall, the group and the Landmark community raised a whopping £380 for the Swift Conservation charity.

Goodbyes and Welcomes

As we come to the end of the term we sadly have to say some goodbyes. The following members of our community will sadly be leaving us. Jaz (year 7) and Zac (year 11) will be leaving for Australia, Mrs Jacky Hulett our geography teacher will be relocating to South Africa and we are also saying goodbye to Katherine our receptionist and Libby one of our Learning Support Assistants. We wish them all the best in their future endeavours.

As we move into the new term we are looking forward to welcoming a family from Colombia in February. We are also excited to welcome Man Wa Chan to our secondary department to teach Geography. We also have a number of other students potentially joining the school in the new year.

As always, we are grateful to you for entrusting your children to us and for being such valued contributors to our school community. We wish you a fantastic holiday and very much look forward to welcoming your children back to school on Tuesday, January 7th.

With very warm regards

Gareth and the Landmark team